
I i . 



■ 






Class J^_5 
Book J K 2,5 



i9<?a 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 

THE DAWN OF HISTORY. An Introduction 

to Pre-historic Study. i2mo. . . $1.25 

OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF 
among the Indo-European Races. Crown 
8vo. , 2.50 



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THE 1L 

DAWN OF HISTORY: 



AN INTRODUCTION TO 

PRE-HISTORIC STUDY. 



EDITED BY 

C. F. KEARY, M.A., F.S.A. 



NEW EDITION. 



NEW YORK : 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 
1902 



aO 



^ 



THE CAXTOX PRESS 
NEW YORK. 



5*7 "T 



PREFACE 



The present edition of the Dawn of History is a con- 
siderable enlargement upon the former, one, as may 
be judged from the fact that the former, including 
the Appendix, contained only 231 pages, whereas the 
present edition contains 357. These enlargements 
have chiefly affected the first four chapters with the 
ninth and tenth, and, generally speaking, the chapters 
for which the editor is wholly responsible. He felt 
himself quite incapable of improving chapters eight, 
eleven, and thirteen, which can hardly fail to be 
recognized as the best in the volume ; and, unhappily, 
the hand which wrote them — that of Annie Keary — is 
no longer able to revise or alter. Some slight cor- 
rections therefore have been made, in accordance 
with the advance of these branches of study during 
recent years, but nothing more. No more were 
needed, for (in the case of the chapters on writing, 
for example) further research has only tended to 
establish more firmly the conclusions here accepted. 
The chapters on early social life (vi., vii.), again, did 



iv PREFACE. 



not seem to the editor to require more than slight 
corrections. 

In the chapters dealing with religion and mytho- 
logy, it was not to be expected that the writers could 
avoid treading upon controversial ground ; but as 
almost every proposition upon these matters is dis- 
puted by some one, it was not possible to adopt the 
plan of putting forward only those facts and theories 
which may be considered as established. Some dis- 
puted points are discussed in the Appendix. Even 
on the subject of language the views of one (small) 
school of philologists had to be relegated in like 
manner to the Appendix. 

So far for the character of the alterations upon the 
first edition. The new matter introduced, whenever 
it has not been of the nature of a correction of the 
old, has been aimed in the direction of making more 
clear the processes through which the human mind 
has gone in the acquisition of each fresh capacity — 
more clear the extent to which each successive phase 
of pre-historic life has been built upon the preceding 
phase — more clear the process by which mankind 
seems to have gone through the stages of language- 
formation, and so forth. This has been the direction 
in which the editor has sought to improve upon the 
earlier edition : rather than in loading his pages by a 
greater accumulation of facts, to make the relation- 
ship of the various facts to one another plainer and 
more easy to remember ; in one word, to appeal to 
the reason much more than to the memory. 

This is by no means the principle on which a great 



PREFACE. 



majority of introductions and manuals seem to have 

been written, but upon a principle almost the reverse 

of this. 

Finally, it has never been lost sight of, that the 

present volume is meant to leave the reader, so to 

say, at the door of history. It is not designed to be 

an anthropology, or a history of the growth of faculty 

among mankind at large, but only a.pre-kzstorzc study, 

an account of the ascertainable doings and thoughts 

on the part of the people who have gone to make up 

the historic races of the world. Even the stone- age 

civilization is treated, not as a phase of culture in the 

abstract, but as an element of the growth in culture 

of the historic nations of our planet. 

C. F. KEARY. 
200, Cromwell Road, S.W. 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 



The advance of pre-historic study has been during 
the last ten years exceptionally rapid ; and, consider- 
ing upon how many subsidiary interests it touches, 
questions of politics, of social life, of religion almost, 
the science of pre-historic archaeology might claim to 
stand in rivalry with geology as the favourite child of 
this century ; as t much a favourite of its declining 
years as geology was of its prime. But as yet, it will 
be confessed, we have little popular literature upon 
the subject, and that for want of it the general reader 
is left a good deal in arrear of the course of discovery. 
His ideas of nationalities and kindredship among 
peoples is, it may be guessed, still hazy. We still 
hear the Russians described as Tartars : and the 
notion that we English are descendants of the lost 
Israelitish tribes finds innumerable supporters. I am 
told that a society has been formed in London for 
collecting proofs of this more than Ovidian metamor- 
phosis. The reason of this public indifference is very 
plain. Pre-historic science has not yet passed out of 



viii PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

that early stage when workers are too busy in the 
various branches of the subject to spare much time 
for a comparison of the results of their labours ; when, 
one may say, fresh contributions are pouring in too 
fast to be placed upon their proper shelves in the 
storehouse of our knowledge. In such a state of 
things the reader who is not a specialist is under 
peculiar disadvantages for a discovery of what has 
been done. He stands bewildered, like the sleeping 
partner in a firm, to whom no one — though he is after 
all the true beneficiary — explains the work which is 
passing before his eyes. 

It will not be thought a misplaced object to attempt 
some such explanation, and that is the object of the 
following chapters. And as at some great triumph of 
mechanism and science — a manufactory, an obser- 
vatory, an ironclad, — a junior clerk or a young 
engineer is told off to accompany the intelligent 
visitor and explain the workings of the machinery ; 
or as, if the simile serve better, in those cities which 
are sought for their treasures of art and antiquity, the 
lower class of the population become self-constituted 
into guides to beauties which they certainly neither 
helped to create nor keep alive ; so this book offers 
itself to the interested student as a guide over some 
parts of the ground covered by pre-historic inquiry, 
without advancing pretensions to stand beside the 
works of specialists in that field. The peculiar 
objects kept in view have been, to put the reader in 
possession of (i) the general results up to this time 
attained, the chief additions which pre-historic science 
has made to the sum of our knowledge, even if this 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. ix 

knowledge can be given only in rough outline ; (2) 
the method or mechanism of the science, the way in 
which it pieces together its acquisitions, and argues 
upon the facts it has ascertained ; and (3) to put this 
information in a form which might be attractive and 
suitable to the general reader. 

The various labours of a crowd of specialists are 
needed to give completeness to our knowledge of 
primitive man, and it is scarcely necessary to say that 
there are a hundred questions which in such a short 
book as this have been left untouched. The intention 
has been to present those features which can best be 
combined to form a continuous panorama, and also to 
avoid, as far as possible, the subjects most under con- 
troversy. No apology surely is needed for the conjoint 
character of the work : as in every chapter the con- 
clusions of many different and sometimes contradictory 
writers had to be examined and compared, and as 
these chapters, few as they are, spread over various 
special fields of inquiry. 

It is to be hoped that some readers to whom pre- 
historic study is a new thing may be sufficiently 
interested in it to desire to continue their researches. 
For the assistance of such, lists are given, at the end, 
of the chief authorities consulted on the subject of 
each chapter, with some notes upon questions of 
peculiar interest. 

The vast extent of the field, the treasures of know- 
ledge which have been already gathered, and the 
harvest which is still in the ear, impress the student 
more and more the deeper he advances into the study 
Surely, if from some higher sphere, beings of a purely 



x PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

spiritual nature — nourished, that is, not by material 
meats and drinks, but by ideas — look down upon the 
lot of man, they must be before everything amazed at 
the complaints of poverty which rise up from every 
side. When every stone on which we tread can yield 
a history, to follow up which is almost the work of a 
lifetime ; when every word we use is a thread leading 
back the mind through centuries of man's life on 
earth ; it must be confessed that, for riches of any 
but a material sort, for a wealth of ideas, the mind's 
nourishment, there ought to be no lack. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

The Earliest Traces of Man (Editor) ... ... i 



CHAPTER II. 
The Second Stone Age (Editor) ... ... ... 28 

CHAPTER III. 
The Growth of Language (Editor) ... ... ... 55 

CHAPTER IV. 
Families of Language (Editor) ... ... ... 83 

CHAPTER V. 
The Nations of the Old World (Editor) ... ... 113 

CHAPTER VI. 
Early Social Life (H. M. Keary) ... *«. ... 135 

CHAPTER VII. 
The Village Community (H. M. Keary) ... ... 156 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

PAGE 

Religion (A. Keary) ... ... ... ... ... I7 1 

CHAPTER IX. 
Aryan Religions (Editor) ... ... ... ... 197 

CHAPTER X. 
The Other World (Editor) ... ... ... ... 236 

CHAPTER XL 
Mythologies and Folk-Tales (Editor) ... ... 254 

CHAPTER XII. 
Picture-Writing (A. Keary) ... ... »«• ... 280 

CHAPTER XIII. 
Phonetic Writing (A. Keary) ... ... ... ... 297 

CHAPTER XIV. 
Conclusion (Editor) ... ... ... ... ... 313 

Appendix — Notes and Authorities ... ••• ••» ••• 329 



THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN. 

When St. Paulmus came to preach Christianity to the 

people of Northumbria, King Eadwine (so runs the legend) 

being minded to hear him, and wishing that 

his people should do so too, called together a The dawn 
.,,.,; ,. r i \ i , i , of history. 

council of his chief men and asked them whether 

they would attend to hear what the saint had to tell ; and 

one of the king's thanes stood up and said, 'Let us certainly 

hear what this man knows, for it seems to me that the life 

of man is like the flight of a sparrow through a large room, 

where you, King, are sitting at supper in winter, while 

storms of rain and snow rage abroad. The sparrow, I say, 

flying in at one door and straightway out again at another 

is, while within, safe from the storm ; but soon it vanishes 

out of sight into the darkness whence it came. So the 

life of man appears for a short space ; but of what went 

before, or what is to follow, we are all ways ignorant.' * This 

wise and true saying of the Saxon thane holds good too for 

the human race as far as its progress is revealed to us by 

1 Bseda, ii. 13. 



THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



history. We can watch this progress through a brief interval 
— for the period over which real, continuous authentic 
history extends; and beyond that is a twilight space, 
wherein, amid many fantastic shapes of mere tradition or 
mythology, here and there an object or an event stands out 
more clearly, lit up by a gleam from the sources of more 
certain knowledge which we possess. 

To draw with as much accuracy as may be the outline of 
these shapes out of the past is the business of the pre- 
historic student ; and to assist him in his task, what has he ? 
First, he has the Bible narrative, wherein some of the chief 
events of the world's history are displayed, but at uncertain 
distances apart. Then we have the traditions preserved in 
other writings, in books, or on old temple stones — in these 
the truth has generally to be cleared from a mist of allegory, 
or at least of mythology. And, lastly, besides these con- 
scious records of times gone by, we have other dumb 
memorials, old buildings — cities or temples — whose makers 
are long since forgotten, old tools or weapons, buried for 
thousands of years, to come to light in our days ; and 
again, old words, old beliefs, old customs, old arts, old 
forms of civilization which have been unwittingly handed 
down to us, can all, if we know the art to interpret their 
language, be made to tell us histories of the antique world. 
It is, then, no uninteresting study by which we learn how to 
make these silent records speak. ' Of man's activity and 
attainment,' Carlyle finely says, 'the chief results are aeriform, 
mystic, and preserved in tradition only : such are his Forms 
of Government, with the Authority they rest on; his 
Customs or Fashions both of Cloth-habits and Soul-habits ; 
much more his collective stock of Handicrafts, the whole 
Faculty he has acquired of manipulating nature — all these 
things, as indispensable and priceless as they are, cannot in 



THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



any way be fixed under lock and key, but must flit, spirit- 
like, on impalpable vehicles from Father to Son ; if you 
demand sight of them they are nowhere to be met with. 
Visible Ploughmen and Hammermen there have been, even 
from Cain and Tubalcain downwards ; but where does your 
accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic and other Manufac- 
turing skill lie warehoused? It transmits itself on the 
atmospheric air, on the sun's rays (by Hearing and by 
Vision) ; it is a thing aeriform, impalpable, of quite spiritual 
sort.' 

How many of these intangible spiritual possessions must 
man have acquired before he has learned the art of writing 
history, and so of keeping a record of what had gone before : 
how much do we know that any individual race of men has 
learned before it brings itself forward with distinctness in 
this way ! For as a first condition of all man must have 
learned to write ; and writing, as we shall hereafter see, is 
a slowly developing art, which man acquired by ages of 
gradual experiment. His language, too, must ere this have 
reached a state of considerable cultivation ; and it will be 
our object in the course of these pages to show through 
what a long history of its own the language of any nation 
must go before it becomes fit for the purposes of literature 
— through how mahy changes it passes, and what a story it 
reveals to us by every change. And then, again, before a 
nation can have a history it must be a nation, must have 
a national life to record; that is to say, the people who 
compose it must have left the simple condition of society 
which belongs to a primitive age, the state of a mere hunter 
or fisher, even the state of being a mere shepherd, the 
pastoral and nomadic life which precedes the knowledge of 
agriculture. He must have drawn closer the loose bonds 
which held men together under the conditions of patriarchal 



THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



life, and have constituted a more permanent system of 
society. Whether under pressure from without, the pressure 
of hostile nationalities, or only from the growth of a higher 
conception of social life, the nation has had to rise from out 
of a mere collection of tribes, until the head of the family 
has become the king — the rude tents of early days have 
grown into houses and temples, and the pens of their sheep- 
folds grown into walled cities, such as Corinth or Athens or 
Rome. Such changes as these must be completed before 
history comes to be written ; and with such changes as these, 
and with a thousand others, changes and growths in Art, in 
Poetry, in Manufactures, in Commerce, and in Laws, the 
pre-historical student has to deal. On all these subjects we 
shall have something to say. 

Before, however, we enter upon any one of these it is 
right that we remind the reader — and remind him once for 
all — that our knowledge upon all these points is but partial 
and uncertain, and never of such a character as will allow 
us to speak with dogmatic assurance. Our information can 
necessarily never be direct ; it can only be built upon 
inferences of a higher or lower degree of probability. It 
is, however, a necessity of our minds that from whatever 
information we possess we must form an unbroken panorama 
— imagination has no place for unfilled blanks ; and we may 
form our picture freely and without danger of harm, so long 
as we are ready to modify or enlarge it when more knowledge 
is forthcoming. As the eye can in a moment supply the 
deficiencies of some incompleted picture, a landscape of 
which it gets only a partial glance, or a statue which has lost 
a feature, so the mind selects from its knowledge those facts 
which form a continuous story, and loses those which are 
known only as isolated fragments. 

Set a practised and an unpractised draughtsman to draw 



THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 5 

a circle, and we may witness how differently they go to work. 
The second never takes his pencil off the paper, and pro- 
duces his effect by one continuous line, which the eye has 
no choice but at once to condemn as incomplete. The wiser 
artist proceeds by a number of short consecutive strokes, 
splitting up, as it were, his divergence over the whole length 
of the figure he is drawing, and so allows the eye, or perhaps 
one should rather say the mind, by that faculty it has, to 
select the complete figure which it can conceive more easily 
than express. No one of the artist's strokes is the true 
fraction of a circle, but the result is infinitely more satis- 
factory than if he had tried to make his pencil follow un- 
swervingly the curve he wished to trace. Or again, notice 
how a skilful draughtsman will patch up by a number of 
small strokes any imperfect portion of a curve he is draw- 
ing, and we have another like instance of this selective 
faculty of the eye or of the mind. Just in the same way is it 
with memory. Our ideas must be carried on continuously, 
we cannot afford to remember lacuna, mere blank spaces. 

In the Bible narrative,'for example, wherein, as has before 
been said, certain events of the world's history are related 
with distinctness, but where as a rule nothing is said of the 
times which intervened between them, we are wont to make 
very insufficient allowance for these unmentioned periods, 
and form for ourselves a rather arbitrary picture of the real 
course of things, fitting two events on to one another which 
were really separated by long ages. To correct this view, 
to enlarge the series of known facts concerning the early 
history of the human race, comes in pre-historic inquiry; 
and again, to correct the picture we now form, doubtless 
fresh information will continue to pour in. All this is no 
reason why we should pronounce our present picture to 
be untrue ; it is only incomplete. We must be always 



THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



ready to enlarge it, and to fill in the outlines, but still 
we can only remember the facts which we have already 
acquired, if we look at them, not as fragments only, but 
as a complete whole. 

In representing, therefore, throughout the following 
chapters, the advance of the human, race in the discovery 
of all those arts and faculties which go to make up civil- 
ization in the light of a continuous progress, it will not 
be necessary to pause and remind the reader in every case 
that these steps of progress which seem to spread themselves 
out so clearly before us have been made in an uncertain 
manner, sometimes rapidly, sometimes very slowly and 
painfully, sometimes by immense strides, sometimes by con- 
tinual haltings and goings backwards and forwards. It 
will be enough to say here, once for all, that our history 
must be thought of as a history of events rather than a 
strictly chronological one; just as the geological periods 
are not measured by days and years, but by the mutations 
through which our solid-seeming earth has passed. 

First we turn to what must needs oe our earliest inquiry 

— the search after the oldest traces of man which have 

The earliest been found upon the earth. It has been said 

traces of that one of the first fruits of knowledge is to 
man - show us our own ignorance; and certainly 
in the early history of the world and of man there is 
nothing which science points out so clearly as the vast 
silent periods whereof until recently we had no idea. It is 
difficult for us of the present age to remember how short 
a time it is since all our certain knowledge, touching the 
earth on which we live, lay around that brief period of its 
existence during which it had come under the notice and 
the care of man. 



THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN. 7 

When all we knew of Europe, and especially of our own 
islands, belonged to the comparatively short time during 
which they have been known to history, we had in truth 
much to wonder at in the political changes these countries 
were seen to have undergone ; and our imaginations could 
be busy with the contrast between the unchanged features of 
our lands and seas and the ever-varying character of those 
who dwelt upon or passed over them. It is interesting to 
think that on such a river bank or on such a shore Caesar 
or Charlemagne have actually stood, and that perhaps the 
grass or flowers or shells under their feet looked just the 
same as they do now, that the waves beat upon the strand 
in the same cadence, or the water flowed by with the same 
trickling sound. But when we open the pages of geology, 
we have unrolled before us a history of the earth itself, 
extending over periods compared with which the longest 
epoch of what is commonly called history seems scarcely 
more than a day, and of mutations in the face of nature so 
grand and awful that as we reflect upon them, forgetting for 
an instant the enormous periods required to bring these 
changes about, they sound like the fantastic visions of some 
seer, telling in allegorical language the history of the 
creation and destruction of the world. 

Of such changes, not the greatest, but the most interest- 
ing to the question we have at present in hand, were those 
vicissitudes of climate which followed upon the time when 
the formation of the crust of the earth had been practically 
completed. We learn of a time when, instead of the 
temperate climate which now favours our country, these 
islands, with the whole of the north of Europe, were wrapped 
in one impenetrable sheet of ice. The tops of our mountains, 
as well as of those of Scandinavia and the north of conti- 
nental Europe, bear marks of the scraping of this enormous 



THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



glacier, which must have risen to a height of two or three 
thousand feet. Not a single green thing, therefore, might 
be seen between our latitudes and the pole, while the ice- 
sheet, passing along the floor of the North Sea, united these 
islands with Scandinavia and spread far out into the deep 
waters of the Atlantic. For thousands of years such a state 
of things endured, but at last it slowly passed away. As 
century followed century the glacier began to decrease in 
size. From being colder than that of any explored portion 
of our hemisphere, the climate of northern Europe began to 
amend, until at last a little land became visible, which was 
covered first with lichens, then with thicker moss, and then 
with grass ; then shrubs began to grow, and they expanded 
into trees and the trees into forests, while still the ice-sheet 
went on decreasing, until now the glaciers remained only in 
the hills. Animals returned from warmer climates to visit 
our shores. The birds and beasts and fishes of the land 
and sea were not much different from those which now 
inhabit there ; the species were different, but the genera 
were for the most part the same. Everything seemed to 
have been preparing for the coming of man, and it is about 
this time that we find the earliest traces of his presence 
upon earth. 1 

We may try and imagine what was the appearance of the 
world, and especially of Europe — for it is in Europe that 
most of these earliest traces of our race have as yet been 
found, though all tradition and likelihood point out man's 
first home to have been in Asia — when we suppose that 
man first appeared upon these western shores. At this 
time the continent of Europe stood at a higher level than 
it does now. The whole of the North Sea, even between 
Scotland and Denmark, is not more than fifty fathoms, or 
1 See Appendix. 



THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN. 9 

three hundred feet deep, while the Irish Sea is not more 
than sixty fathoms; and at this period undoubtedly the 
British Isles, besides being all joined together, formed part 
of the mainland, not by being united to France only, but by 
the presence of dry land all the way from Scotland to 
Denmark, over all that area now called the German Ocean. 
Our Thames and our other eastern rivers were then but 
tributaries of one large stream, which bore through this 
continent, and up into the northern seas, their waters united 
with those of the Rhine, and perhaps of the Weser and the 
Elbe. The same upheaval turned into land a portion of 
the Atlantic Ocean, all that bed probably which now extends 
from Spain and Africa as far as the Azores and the Canaries. 
The north of Africa was joined on to this continent and to 
Spain, for the narrow Straits of Gibraltar had not yet been 
formed; but a great sea stood where we now have the 
Great Sahara, and united the Mediterranean and the Red 
Sea, while a great Mediterranean Sea stood in Central Asia, 
and has left no more than traces in the Caspian Sea and 
the Sea of Aral. 

We have to look at a map to see the effect of these 
changes in the appearance of Europe ; and there were no 
doubt other internal changes in the appearances of the 
countries themselves. The climate still was much more 
extreme than it is now. The glaciers were not yet quite 
gone. And the melting of these and of the winter snows 
gave rise to enormous rivers which flowed from every hill. 
Our little river the Ouse, for instance, which flows out 
through Norfolk into the Wash, was, when swollen by these 
means, probably many miles broad. Vast forests grew upon 
the banks of the rivers, and have left their traces in our 
peat formations; and in these forests roamed animals 
unknown to us. Of these the most notable was the mam- 



io THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



moth (Elephas primi^enius, in the language of the natu- 
ralists), a huge, maned elephant, whose skeleton and gigantic 
tusks are conspicuous in some of our museums, and who 
has given his name to this the earliest age of man's exist- 
ence : it is called the Mammoth Age of man. With the 
mammoth, too, lived other species of animals, which are 
either now extinct, or have since been driven from our 
latitudes; the woolly rhinoceros, the cave lion, the cave 
bear, the Lithuanian bison, the urus, the reindeer, and the 
musk-ox. It is with the remains of these animals, near the 
ancient banks of these great rivers, that we find the earliest 
tools and weapons manufactured by human hands. 

The earliest of all the known remains of human-kind are 
the implements which are found deposited in the ancient 
Implements beds of rivers. Now flooded by melting snow 
of the river into huge lakes and now again drained off 
drift. by the sudden bursting of a bound, it was 
natural that these great streams should often change their 
course, and often dig out huge areas of soil from the land 
upon their banks. In doing so they sometimes dug out the 
implements which earlier generations of men had left behind 
them on the surface of the soil, and which a few years 
would be enough to cover with mould and hide from sight. 
Then carrying along these implements of flint, they have 
deposited them in great beds of sand and gravel, some- 
where in their ancient course. 

We have no means of measuring the time which may have 
elapsed since these stone weapons and tools were made. 
And we need not speak here of the geological changes which 
must have passed over the surface of the earth since they 
were deposited upon it. All we know is that, after the great 
streams flowing through wide valleys have dug these imple- 
ments from under the earth which time had heaped over 



IMPLEMENTS OF THE RIVER DRIFT. n 

them, carried them along and deposited them once more 
amid sand and pebbles in a bed upon some point of its 
course, the river must through long subsequent years have 
cut so much deeper into the valley through which it flowed, 
and at the same time probably so shrunk in its bed, that 
these river drifts, as they are called, stand in many cases 
fifty, eighty, a hundred feet above the level of the present 
stream. It is because they are found in the beds made 
by the ancient rivers, that the implements of this period 
are called drift implements. 

The river Ouse, of which we spoke just now, which, 
though to-day a small river, drains a large and level country 
as it runs through the counties of Bedford, Huntingdon, 
and Cambridge, has been one of the most prolific in this 
class of pre-historic remains. Another river which still 
better deserves to be remembered in this respect is the 
Somme in the north of France. For it was in the beds of 
this stream, by Abbeville and Amiens, that the drift 
implements were first discovered, or first recognized for 
what they really are, the earliest traces of human labour ; and 
it was here that the foundation was laid for this branch of 
pre-historic study by M. Boucher de Perthes. This was 
forty-one years ago, in 1847. 

These drift implements, then, form a class apart — apart 
even from all other stone implements made by man, and 
probably earlier than any other class. Very simple and 
rude are these drift implements. It would require a skilled 
eye to detect any difference between most of them and a 
flint which had only been chipped by natural means. But 
the first thing to remember is, that the makers of these 
implements had nothing but other still ruder materials to 
help them in this manufacture of theirs. Metals of all 
kinds were as yet utterly unknown to man. 



THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



We who are so habituated to the employment of metal, 
either in the manufacture or the composition of every article 
which meets our eye, can scarcely realize that man lived 
long ages on the earth before the metals and minerals, its 
hidden treasures, were revealed to him. This pen I write 
with is of metal, or, were it a quill, it would still have been 
shaped by the use of steel ; the rags of which this paper is 
made up have been first cut by metal knives, then bleached 
by a mineral (chlorine), then torn on a metal cylinder, then 
thrown into a vat which was either itself of metal or had 
been shaped by metal tools, then drawn on a wire-cloth, etc. 
And so it is with everything which is made nowadays. We 
can scarcely think of any single manufacture in which is not 
traceable the paramount influence of man's discoveries 
beneath the surface of the ground. But primitive man 
could profit by no such inherited knowledge, and had only 
begun to acquire some powers which he could transmit to 
his own descendants. For his tools he must look to the 
surface of the earth only ; and the hardest substances he 
could find were stones. Not only during the period of 
which we are now speaking, but for hundreds, perhaps 
thousands, of years lasted man's ignorance of the metals, 
ignorance therefore of all that the metals could produce 
for him. The long age of this state of ignorance is dis- 
tinguished in pre-history by the name of the Stone Age, 
because the hardest things then known to mankind were 
stones, and the most important of his implements and 
utensils had therefore to be made of stones. 

There can be no harm if we so far anticipate our second 
chapter as to say that this Stone Age is distinguished by 
pre-historic students into two main periods : (i) the age in 
which all the stone implements were made exclusively by 
chipping, (2) the age in which grinding or polishing was, 



IMPLEMENTS OF THE RIVER DRIFT. 13 

brought in to supplement the use of chipping. Wherefore 
the first age is also called the Unpolished Stone Age, the 
second is called the Polished Stone Age. Not that by any 
means all the implements in the later age were made of 
polished stone ; far from it. Only that, contemporaneously 
with the stone implements still made by chipping merely, 
others of polished stone were used. But of this more here- 
after. Lastly, the two epochs are also distinguished more 
simply as the Old Stone Age and the New Stone Age — 
or, turned into Greek, the Palaeolithic Era and the Neolithic 
Era. 

Now we go back to speak of the Palaeolithic Era only. 
And in this we have as yet got no further than the im- 
plements of the river drifts. It is not to be supposed that 
at any time of his history man used implements of stone 
and no others ; for wood and bone must have been always as 
ready to his hand as stone was, and for many purposes bone 
and wooden utensils would serve better than stone ones. 
But the stone implements would always deserve to be 
accounted the most important ; because by means of them 
the others of softer material must have been shaped. As 
regards the drift deposits, here the remains of man's work are 
exclusively stone implements, but probably only because all 
that were made of some softer substance have perished, or 
remain as yet undiscovered. And most primitive these 
stone tools or weapons are. By the rudeness and uniformity 
of their shapes as contrasted even with other classes of stone 
implements, they testify to the simplicity of those who 
manufactured them. They have for the most part only 
two or three distinctive types : they are either of a long, 
pear-shaped make, narrowed almost to a point at the thin 
end, and adapted, we may suppose, for boring holes, while 
the broad end of the pear was pressed against the palm of 



i 4 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



the hand ; and secondly, of a sort of oval form, chipped all 
round the edge, capable of being fitted into a wooden 
haft, a cleft stick or whatever it might be, to form an 
implement which might be used for all sorts of cutting or 
scraping. A variety of this last implement, of rather a 
tongue-like shape, was called by the French workmen who 
worked under M. Boucher de Perthes, langue-de-chat. These 
might serve the purpose of spear-heads. Some have sup- 
posed that stones of this last form were used, as similar 
ones are used by the Esquimaux to this day, in cutting holes 
in the ice for the purpose of fishing : we must not forget 
that during at any rate a great part of the early stone age 
the conditions of life were those of arctic countries at the 
present time. A third variety of stone implements is made 
of thinner flakes, and capable of being used as a knife.* 

We cannot determine all the uses to which primitive man 
must have put his rude and ineffective weapons ; we can 
only wonder that with such he was able to maintain his 
existence among the savage beasts by which he was sur- 
rounded ; and we long to form to ourselves some picture of 
the way in which he got the better of their huge strength, as 
well as of his dwelling-place, his habits, and his appearance. 
Rude as his weapons are, and showing no trace of improve- 
ment, it seems as though man of the drift period must have 
lived through long ages of the world's history. These 
implements are found associated with the remains of the 
mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, animals naturally 
belonging to the arctic or semi-arctic climate which suc- 
ceeded the glacial era; but like implements are found, 
associated with the remains of the bones of the lion, the 

* Mr. Evans in his Stone Implements of Great Britain divides those 
of the River Drift into Flakes, Pointed Implements, and Sharp-rimmed 
Implements. 



IMPLEMENTS OF THE CAVES. 15 

tiger, and the hippopotamus, all of which, and the last 
especially, are rarely found outside the torrid zone. This 
would imply that the drift implements lasted through the 
change from a rigid to a torrid climate, and probably back 
again to a cold temperate one. 

Contemporary very likely with some portion of the drift 

period are another series of deposits which contain still 

more interesting traces of early man. These 

are what are called the cave deposits — a remark- ?? emen s ' 

r of the caves. 

able series of discoveries made in caves in. 

various parts of Europe which appear to carry us down 

farther in the history of human development. 

These caves are natural caverns, generally formed in the 
limestone rocks, and at present the most remarkable ' finds ' 
have been obtained from the caves of Devonshire, of the 
Department of the Dordogne in France, from various caves 
in Belgium, and from a very remarkable cavern in the 
Neanderthal, near Diisseldorf, in Germany. But there is 
scarcely any country in 'Europe where some caves containing 
human bones and weapons have not been opened. The / 
rudest drift implements seem older than almost any of those * 
found in caves ; and, on the whole, the cave-remains seem 
to give us a picture of man in a more civilized condition 
than the man of the drift. 

Let us pause for one moment before these cave remains. 
For, simple as they are, they open a little bit the veil which 
hides from us the lives of the earliest of men. We call the 
things which we have found implements. For we cannot 
really tell whether they should be called tools or weapons. 
Nay, and this is a thing worth remembering, in the most 
primitive conditions of society man's tools are his weapons 
and his weapons are almost his only tools. Man's first 



16 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

condition of life is the venatory condition. He is at first a 
mere hunter (or trapper) and fisherman. He begins without 
the use of any domestic animal. He has not even the dog, 
at first, to help him in his hunting ; much less has he 
cattle or sheep to vary his occupation in life. With the 
rest of the animal creation he is constantly at war. He 
preys upon other animals, and other animals, if they can, prey 
upon him. Wherefore, as I have said, his earliest tools are 
likewise his weapons, his weapons are his tools ; and the 
arts of peace and war are undistinguishable. 

The next distinct stage of life is the pastoral stage. Man 
has now his domesticated animals ; he has cattle and sheep 
and horses maybe. Tending his flocks and herds is now 
his chief occupation. But this tending implies protecting 
them and himself. And still, though some of his imple- 
ments are for peaceful use — his crooks, his goads, his 
lassoes, his bridles, his hurdles and sheep-pens, or, again, 
his needles for sewing together the hides which form his 
clothes — still most are for war. Yet, if any distinction is 
possible, his weapons should now be those of defence rather 
than those of offence. 

The third great stage is the agricultural — a stage of life 
at which all civilized nations and many which can hardly be 
called civilized have arrived ; when man ploughs and sows, 
and reaps, plants vines and orchards. Then most of the 
implements used in these industries, the implements on 
which therefore his nourishment depends, are wholly dis- 
tinct from the weapons of war, and the peaceful existence 
has become (as the phrase is) differentiated from the warlike. 
This is the token of a higher civilization. 

At present we are far from such a stage of progress in 
the history of man. The cave-dwellers were, we may be sure, 
in the hunting and fishing stage of civilization ; and we 



IMPLEMENTS OF THE CAVES. 



cannot really tell, among a large proportion of their weapons, 
which were designed to serve against animals for the purposes 
of the chase, and which against their fellow-men. We can 
hardly distinguish among some of their weapons whether 
they were to be used in hunting or fishing. They had stone 
axes and spear-heads, and they also had what we may call 
harpoons. But harpoons are merely lances attached to a 
thong, and may be used with equal success against animals 
or against the larger fish, salmons or whales. These harpoons 
are barbed. They are made of wood and of bone. A 
curious and close inquiry has discovered that the bones of 
animals found among the human remains in the caves have 
been scored in such a way as to suggest that the sinews were 
cut from them — to be used, no doubt, as thongs to the har- 
poons, as lines for fishing, as threads for sewing garments, 
etc. The cave men had also barbed hooks — fishing-hooks 
we may call them ; though they too may sometimes have 
been employed against animals or even birds. It is most 
probable that these primitive men did not know the use of 
the bow and arrow, and that the name arrow-heads some- 
times given to certain of their weapons is a misnomer ; that 
they should be called javelin-heads. Bone awls have been 
found, no doubt for the sake (chiefly) of piercing the scraped 
skins of animals, which might afterwards be sewn together 
into garments : bone knives, pins, and needles have also 
been found — the last a most important form of implement 
— in considerable numbers. 

What is still more interesting than all these discoveries, we 
here find the rudiments of art. Some of the bone imple- 
ments, as well as some stones, are engraved, or even rudely 
sculptured, generally with the representation of an animal. 
These drawings are singularly faithful, and really give us a 
picture of the animals which were man's contemporaries 

c 



18 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



upon the earth; so that we have the most positive proof 
that man lived the contemporary of animals long since 
extinct. The cave of La Madeleine, in the Dordogne, for 
instance, contained a piece of a mammoth's tusk engraved 
with an outline of that animal ; and as the mammoth was 
probably not contemporaneous with man during the latter 
part even of the old-stone age, this gives an immense 
antiquity to the first dawnings of art. How little could the 
scratcher of this rough sketch — for it is not equal in skill to 
drawings which have been found in other caves— dream of 
the interest which his performance would excite thousands 
of years after his death ! Not the greatest painter of sub- 
sequent times, and scarcely the greatest sculptor, can hope 
for so near an approach to immortality for their works. 
Had man's bones been only found in juxtaposition with 
those of the mammoth and his contemporary animals, this 
might possibly have been attributed to chance disturbances 
of the soil, to the accumulation of river deposits, or to many 
other accidental occurrences ; or had the mammoth's bone 
only been found worked by man, there was nothing positive 
to show that the animal had not been long since extinct, 
and this a chance bone which had come into the hands c*f 
a later inhabitant of the earth, just as it has since come into 
our hands ; but the actual drawing of this old-world, and as 
it sometimes seems to us almost fabulous, animal, by one 
who actually saw him in real life, gives a strange picture of 
the antiquity of our race, and withal a strange feeling of 
fellowship with this stone-age man who drew so much in 
the same way as a clever child among us might have drawn 
to-day. 1 

1 Most of these carved implements were discovered by Mr. Christy 
and M. Lartet, and left by the former to the French Museum of Pre- 
historic Antiquities at St. Germains. Exact copies of these in plaster. 



IMPLEMENTS OF THE CAVES. 19 

It is worth while to look well at these cave-drawings. 
They are of various degrees of merit, for some are so skilful 
as to excite the admiration of artists and the astonishment 
of archaeologists. And it is a curious fact that during ages 
which succeeded those of the cave-dwellers, all through the 
polished stone period and the age of bronze — of which we 
shall have to speak anon — no such ambitious imitative 
works of art seem to have been attempted. So far as we 
can tell, these after generations of men aimed at no such 
thing as a drawing of an animal or even of a plant. They 
confined themselves to ornamental patterns, to certain 
arrangements of points and lines. The love of imitation is 
doubtless one of the rudimentary feelings in the human 
mind ; as we may see by watching children. But, rudi- 
mentary as it is, it springs from the same root as the highest 
promptings of the intellect — that is to say, from the wish to 
create — to fashion something actually ourselves. This is 
sufficient to explain the origin of these carvings ; yet we 
need not suppose that when the art of making them was 
once known they were Used merely for amusement. Long 
afterwards we find such drawings and representations looked 
upon as having some qualities of the things they repre- 
sent \ as, for instance, where in an ancient grave at Maeshow, 
in the Orkney islands, we find the drawing of a dragon, 
which had been supposed to watch over the treasures con- 
cealed therein. Savages in the present day often think that 
part of them is actually taken away when a drawing of them 
is made, and exactly a similar feeling gave rise to the super- 
stition so prevalent in the Middle Ages, that witches and 

as well as several carved bones, may however be seen at the British 
Museum ; and during the last year the national collection has been 
greatly enriched by the acquisition of several beautiful specimens of 
cave carvings from the collection of M. Pecadeau de l'Isle. 



THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



magicians could make a figure in wax to imitate the 
one on whom they wished to wreak their vengeance, and 
that all the pains inflicted upon this waxen antitype were 
reproduced in the body of the victim. On such confusion 
of ideas do all idolatries rest. So may we not, without too 
bold a flight, imagine that some superstitious notions, 
touching the efficacy of these drawings, was a spur to the 
industry of our first forerunners on the earth, and con- 
tributed to their wonderfully acquired skill in their art? 
May they not have thought that their representations gave 
them some power over the animals they represented : that 
the lance-head carved with a mammoth would be efficient 
against the mammoth's hide ; that the harpoon containing 
the representation of a deer or a fish was the weapon 
best adapted for transfixing either ? * 

However this may be, we cannot close our eyes to the 
interest which attaches to the first dawnings of art in the 
world. Nor is this interest confined altogether to its 
aesthetic side — the mere beauty and value of art itself — great 
though this be. Not only does drawing share that mysteri- 
ous power of imparting intense pleasure which belongs to 
every form of art, but it was likewise, after human speech, 
the first discovered means of conveying an idea from one 
man to another. As we shall come to see in a later chapter, 
the invention of drawing bore with it the seeds of the inven- 
tion of writing, the greatest step forward, in material things 
at any rate, that man has ever made. 

There is one other fact to be mentioned, and then the 
information which our cave discoveries can give us concern- 
ing the life of man in those days is pretty nearly exhausted. 
Traces of fires have been found in several caves, so that there 
can be no doubt that man had made this important discovery, 

1 See Appendix. 



HUMAN REMAINS. 21 

the discovery of fire, also. It seems to us impossible to 
imagine a time when men could have lived upon the earth 
without this all-useful element, when they must have de- 
voured their food uncooked, and only sheltered themselves 
from the cold by the thickness of their clothing, or at night 
by huddling together in close underground houses. We 
have certainly no proof that man's existence was ever of 
such a sort as this ; but yet it is clear that the art of making 
fires is one not discoverable at first sight. How long man 
took to find out that method of ignition by friction of two 
sticks — the method employed in different forms by all the 
less cultivated nations spread over the globe, and one which 
we may therefore fairly take to be the most primitive and 
natural — we shall never know. We have only the negative 
evidence that he had discovered it at that primaeval time 
when he began to leave his remains within the caves. 

Thus have we completed the catalogue of facts upon 
which we may build up for ourselves some representation of 
the life of man in the earliest ages of his existence upon 
earth. It must be confessed that they are meagre enough. 
We should like some further facts which would help us to 
picture the man himself, his size, his appearance, what race 
he most resembled of any of those which now inhabit our 
globe. Unfortunately we have little that can assist us here. 
Human remains have been found — on one or two occasions 
a skeleton in tolerably complete preservation — but not yet in 
sufficient numbers to allow us to draw any certain conclusions 
from them, or even to hazard any very probable conjecture. 

Among these discoveries of human skeletons, none excited 

more interest at the time it was made than the 

Neanderthal skeleton, so-called from the place Human 
t • , . . , „,. .. remains, 

in which it was found. The discovery was 

made in 1857 by Dr. Fuhlrott of Elberfeld : and when the 



22 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

skull and other parts of the skeleton were exhibited at a 
scientific meeting at Bonn, in the same year, doubts were 
expressed as to the human character of the remains. These 
doubts, which were soon dissipated, arose from the very low 
type of the head, which was pronounced by many to be the 
most ape-like skull that they had ever seen. The bones 
themselves indicated a person of much the same stature as 
a European of the present day, but with such an unusual 
thickness in some of them as betokened a being of very 
extraordinary strength. This discovery, had it been sup- 
ported by others, might have seemed to indicate a race of 
men of a type inferior even to the most savage races of our 
present globe. But it has not been so supported. On the 
contrary, another skull found at Engis, near Liege, not more 
than seventy miles from the cave of the Neanderthal, was 
proved after careful measurements not to differ materially 
from the skulls of individuals of the European race — a fact 
which prevents us from making any assertions respecting 
the primitive character in race or physical conformation of 
these cave-dwellers. Indeed, in a very careful and elaborate 
paper upon the Engis and Neanderthal skulls, Professor 
Huxley places an average skull of a modern native of 
Australia about half-way between those of the Neanderthal 
and Engis caves ; but he also says that after going through a 
large collection of Australian skulls, he ' found it possible to 
select from among these crania two (connected by all sorts 
of intermediate gradations), the one of which should very 
nearly resemble the Engis skull, while the other should 
somewhat less closely approximate to the Neanderthal 
skull in form, size, and proportions.' And yet as regards 
blood, customs, or language, the natives of Southern and 
Western Australia are as pure and homogeneous as almost 
any race of savages in existence. This shows us how 



HUMAN REMAINS. 23 

difficult would have been any reasoning founded upon the 
insufficient data we possess. In fact, it would no doubt be 
possible to find in Europe among persons of abnormal 
under-development, such as idiots, skulls of a formation 
which would match that of the Neanderthal. 

This class of evidence is therefore merely negative. We 
certainly cannot pronounce that man of the old stone age 
was of a lower type than low types of savages of the present 
day j we cannot even say that he was as undeveloped as are 
the Lapps of modern Europe ; but in this negative evidence 
there is a certain amount of satisfaction. We might be not 
unwilling to place on the level of the Eskimo or the Lapp 
the fashioners of the rudest of the stone implements, but 
the artists of the caves we may well imagine to have 
attained a higher development. And there is nothing at all 
unreasonable or opposed to our experience of Nature in 
supposing a race of human beings to have flourished in 
Europe in these old times, to have been possessed of a 
certain amount of civilization, but not to have advanced from \ 
that towards any very great improvement before they were 
at last extinguished by some other race with a greater faculty < 
for progress. As we shall come to see later on, there is 
some reason for connecting man of the later stone age as 
regards race with the Eskimo or Lapp of to-day. Yet even 
if this be admitted, we must look upon the latter rather as 
the dregs of the races they represent. It is not always the 1 
highest types of any particular race, whether of men, of 
animals, or of plants, which live the longest. Species which 1 
were o^ce flourishing are often only represented by stunted 
and inferior descendants ; just as the animals of the lizard 
class once upon a time, and long before the coming of man 
upon the earth, had their age of greatest development and 
reached proportions which are unknown in these days. 



24 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

So we may imagine man spreading out at various times 
and in many different streams from his first home in Asia, 
The earlier races to leave this nursing-place did not, we 
may suppose, contain sufficient force to carry them beyond 
a low level of culture; very likely they sank in civilization 
and in the end got pushed on one side by more energetic 
people who came like a second wave from the common 
source. When, in the history of the world, we come to speak 
of races of whom we know more, we shall see strong reasons 
to believe that this was the rule followed ; nay, it is even 
followed at the present day, where European races are 
spreading over all the world, and gradually absorbing or 
extinguishing inferior members of the human family. We 
must, therefore, in our present state of ignorance, be con- 
tent to look upon palaeolithic man merely as we find him, 
and not to advance vague surmises whether he gradually 
advanced to the use of better stone weapons, and at last to 
metals, or whether he was extinguished by subsequent races 
who did thus advance. 

Taking, then, this race as we find it, without speculating 
upon its immediate origin or future, we may endeavour 

The life of to gather some notion of man's way of life 

palaeolithic in these primitive times. It was of the simplest. , 
man. We may . we Y\ suppose, for some proofs to the 
contrary would otherwise most likely have been discovered, 
that his life was that of the hunter, which is, it has been said, 
generally the earliest phase of human society, and that he 
had not yet learned to till the ground, or to keep domestic 
animals for his use. No bones of animals like the sheep or 
dog are found among palaeolithic remains, and therefore it 
seems probable that palaeolithic man had not yet entered 
upon the next and higher phase, the pastoral life. He had 
probably no fixed home, no idea of nationality, scarcely 



THE LIFE OF PALAEOLITHIC MAN. 25 

any of obligations beyond the circle of his own family, in 
that larger sense in which the word ' family ' is generally 
understood by savages. Some sort of family or tribe no 
doubt held together, were it only for the sake of protect- 
ing themselves against the attacks of their neighbours. 
For the rest, their time was spent, as the time of other 
savages is spent, out of doors in fighting and hunting, 
within doors in preserving their food and their skins, in 
elaborately manufacturing their implements of stone and 
bone. In the inclement seasons they were crowded 
together in their caves, perhaps for months together, as 
the Eskimo are in winter, almost without moving. As 
appears from the remains in the caves, they, were in the 
habit at such times of throwing the old bones and the offal 
of their food into any corner (the Eskimo do so to this day), 
without taking the smallest trouble to obviate the unpleasant 
effects produced by the decay of all this animal matter in an 
atmosphere naturally close. Through the long winter nights 
they found time to perfect their skill in those wonderful 
bone carvings, and to lay up a store of weapons which they 
afterwards — anticipating the rise of commerce — exchanged 
with the inhabitants of some other cave for their peculiar 
manufacture ; for in one of the caves of the Dordogne we 
find the remains of what must have been a regular manufac- 
tory of one sort of flint-knife or lance-head, almost to the 
exclusion of any other of the ordinary weapons, while 
another cave seems to have been devoted as exclusively to 
the production of implements of bone. 

Man had no doubt a hard life, not only to obtain the 
food he needed, but to defend himself against the attacks 
of many wild animals by whom he was surrounded, animals 
whose particular species have in many cases become extinct, 
and whose classes have long ceased to inhabit Europe. 



26 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

Such are the cave lion, cave bear, cave hyaena, brown 
bear, grizzly bear, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, urus, 
bison, and such rarities (with us) as the reindeer, the 
Irish elk, and the beaver. 

Some people have thought that they discovered in the 
traces of fires which had been sometimes lighted before 
caves in which were found human skeletons, the indication 
of sepulchral rites, and that these caves were used as burial- 
places. But these suppositions are too vague and uncertain 
to be relied upon. It may, however, be said that we have 
evidence pointing to the fact that even in the drift period 
men buried their dead, and it is hardly possible to believe 
that they did so without paying some obsequies to the 
remains. On this interesting subject of sepulchral rites we 
must forbear to say anything until we come to speak of the 
second stone age. Our knowledge of the early stone-people 
must close with the slight picture we have been able to form 
of their life ; of their death, of their rites of the dead, and 
the ideas concerning a future state which these might 
indicate, we cannot speak. 

This, then, is all we know of man of the first stone age, 
and it is not probable that our knowledge will ever be 
greatly increased. New finds of these stone implements 
are being made almost every day, not in Europe only, 
though at present chiefly there, but in many other parts 
of the globe. But the new discoveries closely resemble 
the old, the same sort of implements recur again and 
again, and we only learn by them over how great a part 
of the globe this stage in our civilization extended. Further 
information of this kind may change some of our theories 
concerning the duration or the origin of this civilization, but 
it will not add much to our knowledge of its nature. Yet 
it cannot be denied that the thought of man's existence 



THE LIFE OF PALEOLITHIC MAN. 27 

only, though we know little more than this, a contemporary 
of the mammoth at the time which immediately succeeded 
the glacial period, or perhaps before the glacial period had 
quite come to an end, is full of the deepest interest for us. 
The long silent time which intervenes between the creation 
of our first parents and those biblical events whereof the 
narration is to a certain extent continuous and consecutive, 
till the dawn of history in the Bible narrative in fact, is to 
some small extent filled in. We shall see in the next 
chapter how the second stone age serves to carry the same 
picture further. In rudest outline the life of man is placed 
before us, and if we have no more than this, we have at 
any rate something which may occupy our imaginations, and 
prevent them, as they otherwise would do, as, of old, men's 
minds did, from leaping almost at a bound from the Creation 
to the Flood, and from the Flood to the time of Abraham. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE SECOND STONE AGE. 

Between the earlier and the later stone age, between man 
of the drift period and man of the neolithic era, occurs a 
The age of vast blank which we cannot fill in. We bid 
polished adieu to the primitive inhabitants of our earth 
stone. w hile they are still the contemporaries of the 
mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, or of the cave lion and the 
cave bear, and while the very surface of the earth wears a 
different aspect from what it now wears. With a changed 
condition of things, with a race of animals which differed 
not essentially from those known to us, and with a settled 
conformation of our lands and seas not again to be departed 
from, comes before us the second race of man — man of the 
polished stone age. We cannot account for the sudden 
break ; or, what is in truth the same thing, many different 
suggestions to account for it have been made. Some have 
supposed that the palaeolithic men lived at a time anterior 
to the last glacial era, for there were many glacial periods 
in Europe, and were either exterminated altogether or 
driven thence to more southern countries by the change in 
climate. Others have imagined that a new and more 
cultivated race migrated into these countries, and at once 
introduced the improved weapons of the later stone age; 



THE KITCHEN-MIDDENS. 29 

and lastly, others have looked upon the first stone age as 
having existed before the Deluge, and hold that the second 
race of man, the descendants of Noah, began at once with 
a higher sort of civilization. Two of these four theories, it 
will be seen, must suppose that man somewhere went 
through the stages of improvement necessary to the intro- 
duction of the newer sort of weapons, and they therefore 
take it for granted that the graduated series of stone imple- 
ments, indicating a gradual progress from the old time to 
the newer, though they have not yet been found, are to be 
discovered somewhere. The first and last theories would 
seem to be more independent of this supposition, and 
therefore, as far as our knowledge yet goes, to be more in 
accordance with the facts which we possess. It is, however, 
by no means safe to affirm that the graduated series of 
implements required to support the other suppositions will 
never be found. 

Be this as it may, with the second era begins something 

like a continuous history of our race. However scanty the 

marks of his tracks, we may feel sure that from 

this time forward man passed on one unbroken e . J 1 , c 

1 middens. 

journey of development and change through the 
forgotten eras of the world's life down to the dawn of 
history. We take the rudest condition in which we find 
man to be the most primitive, and we start with him in this 
new stone age as still a fisher or a hunter only. He first 
appears before us as depending for his nourishment chiefly 
upon the shell-fish on certain coasts of northern Europe. 
In the north of Europe — that is to say, upon the shores of 
the Baltic — are found numbers of mounds, some five or ten 
feet high, and in length as much, sometimes, as a thou- 
sand feet, by one or two hundred feet in breadth. The 



30 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

mounds consist for the most part of myriads of cast-away 
shells of oysters, mussels, cockles, and other shell-fish; 
mixed up with these are not a few bones of birds and 
quadrupeds, showing that these also served for food to the 
primitive dwellers by the shell mounds. The mounds are 
called in the present day kjokken-moddings, kitchen- 
middens. They have been chiefly found in Denmark. 
They are, in truth, the refuse heaps of the earliest kitchens 
which have smoked in these northern regions ; 1 for they 
are the remains of some of the earliest among the polished- 
stone age inhabitants of Europe. So primitive are the 
weapons of the Danish kitchen-middens, that they have 
sometimes been classed with the old stone age implements. 
But I believe some traces of grinding if not of polishing 
have been found on them. And at any rate the mammalia 
contemporary with the kitchen-midden men are very different 
from those of the drift or of the caves. 

The raisers of these refuse mounds were, we may judge, 
pre-eminently fishers ; and not generally fishers of that 
adventurous kind who seek their treasure in the depths of 
the ocean. They lived chiefly upon those smaller fish and 
shell-fish which could be caught without much difficulty or 
danger. Yet not only on these; for the bones of some 
deep-sea fish have also been discovered, whence we know 
that these mound-raisers were possessed of the art of 
navigation, though doubtless in a most primitive form. 
Among remains believed to be contemporary with the shell 
mounds are found canoes not built of planks, as our boats 
and as most canoes are nowadays, but merely hollowed out 
of the trunks of trees; sometimes these canoes are quite 

1 It is curious that there are no remains in Scandinavia which can 
with certainty be called palaeolithic. It would seem as though during 
this era the countries remained too cold for habitation. 



THE KITCHEN-MIDDENS. 31 

straight fore and aft, just as the trunk was when it was cut, 
sometimes a little bevelled from below, like a punt of the 
present day ; but we believe they are never found rounded 
or pointed at the prow. Here, then, we see another 
discovery which has been of the greatest use to mankind, 
whereof the first traces come to us from these northern 
shell mounds. That 'heart with oak and bronze thrice 
bound,' the man who first ventured to sea in the first vessel, 
had lived before this time. Whoever he was, we cannot, if 
we think of it, refuse to endorse the praise bestowed upon 
him by the poet ; it required no mean courage to venture 
out to sea on such a strange make-shift as was the first 
canoe. Perhaps the earliest experiment was an involuntary 
one, made by some one who was washed away upon a large 
log or felled tree. We can fancy how thence would arise 
the notion of venturing again a little way, then of hollowing 
a seat in the middle of the trunk, until the primitive canoes, 
such as we find, came into existence. 

In these imperfect vessels men gradually ventured further 
and further into the ocean ; and, judging of the extent of 
their voyages by the deep-sea remains, we may be certain 
that their bravery was fatal to many. This is in all proba- 
bility the history of the discovery or re-discovery of the art 
of navigation among savage people generally ; in all cases 
does the canoe precede the regular boat. I say 're-discovery' 
because a nation which has settled long inland might very 
easily lose the art even if their ancestors had possessed it. 
For it is a fact that people rarely begin attempts at ship- 
building before they come to live near the sea. As long as 
they can range freely on land, their rivers do not tempt 
them to any dangerous experiments. But the vast plain of 
the sea is too important, and makes too great an impression 
on their imagination for its charm to be long withstood. 



32 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



Sooner or later, with much risk of life, men are sure to try 
and explore its solitudes, and navigation takes its rise. 
This art of seafaring, then, is amongst the most noticeable 
of the belongings of the fishermen of the shell mounds. 
Considering that they had none but rude stone imple- 
ments, the felling and hollowing of trees must have 
been an affair of no small labour, and very likely occupied 
a great deal of their time when they were not actually 
seeking their food, even though the agency of fire supple- 
mented the ineffectual blows of their stone weapons. They 
probably used nets for their sea-fishing, made most likely of 
twisted bark or grass. And they were hunters as well as 
fishers, for it has been said that the remains of various animals 
have been discovered on the shell mounds. From these 
remains we see that the age of the post-glacial animals has 
by this time quite passed away ; no mammoth, woolly rhino- 
ceros, or cave lion or bear is found ; even the reindeer, 
which in palaeolithic days must have ranged over France 
and Switzerland, has retired to the north. 

The fact is, the climate is now much more temperate and 
uniform than in the first stone age. Then the reindeer 
and the chamois, animals which belong naturally to regions 
of ice and snow, freely traversed, in winter at least, the 
valleys or the plains far towards the south of Europe. 1 
But as the climate changed, the first was driven to the 
extreme north of Europe, and the second to the higher 
mountain peaks. The only extinct species belonging to the 
shell mounds is the wild bull {bos primigenius), which how- 
ever survived in Europe until quite historical times. His 
remains appear in great numbers, as do those of the seal, 
now very rare, and the beaver, which is extinct in Denmark. 
No remains of any domesticated animal are found ; but the 
1 Both in Switzerland and in the neighbourhood of the Pyrenees. 



THE KITCHEN-MIDDENS. 33 

existence of tame dogs is guessed at from the fact that the 
bones bear traces of the gnawing of canine teeth, and from 
the absence of bones of young birds and of the softer bones 
of animals generally. For it has been shown experimentally 
that just such portions are absent from these skeletons as will 
be devoured when birds or animals of the same species are 
given to dogs at this day. Dogs, therefore, we may feel 
pretty sure, were domesticated by the stone-age men ; so 
here again we can see the beginning of a step in civilization 
which has been of incalculable benefit to man, the taming 
of animals for his use. The ox, the sheep, the goat, were 
as yet unknown ; man was still in the hunter's condition, 
and had not advanced to the shepherd state, only training 
for his use the dog, to assist him in pursuit, of the wild 
animals who supplied part of his food. He was, too, utterly 
devoid of all agricultural knowledge. Probably the domes- 
tication of the dog marks a sort of transition state between 
the hunter and the shepherd. When that experiment has 
been tried, the notion must sooner or later spring up of 
training other animals, and keeping them for use or food. 
With regard to the dogs themselves, it is a curious fact that 
those of the stone age are smaller than those of the bronze 
period, while the dogs of the bronze age are again smaller 
than those of the age of iron. This is an illustration of the 
well-known fact that domestication increases the size and 
improves the character of animals, as gardening does that of 
plants. 

There is one other negative fact which we gather from the 
bones of these refuse-heaps — no human bones are mingled 
with them ; so we may conclude that these men were not 
cannibals. In fact, cannibalism is an extraordinary perver- 
sion of human nature, arising it is difficult to say exactly 
how, and only showing itself among particular people and 



34 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

under peculiar conditions. There is no doubt that, among 
a very large proportion of the savage nations which at pre- 
sent inhabit our globe, cannibalism is practised, and of this 
fact many explanations have been offered ; but they are 
generally far-fetched and unsatisfactory ; and it is certainly 
not within our scope to discuss them here. How little 
natural cannibalism is even to the most savage men is 
proved by the fact that man is scarcely ever, except under 
urgent necessity, found to feed upon the flesh of carnivorous 
or flesh-eating animals, and this alone, besides every instinct 
of our nature, would be sufficient to prevent him from 
eating his fellow-men. 

We have many proofs of the great antiquity of the shell 
mounds. Their position gives one. Whilst most of them 
are confined to the immediate neighbourhood of the sea- 
shore, some few are found at a distance of several miles 
inland. These exceptions may always be referred to the 
presence of a stream which has gradually deposited its 
mud at the place where it emptied itself into the sea, or 
to some other sufficient cause of the protrusion of the coast- 
line ; so that these miles of new coast have come into 
existence after the shell mounds were raised. On the other 
hand, there are no mounds upon those parts of the coast 
which border on the Western Ocean. But it is just here 
that, owing to a gradual depression of the land at the rate 
of two or three inches in a century * the waves are slowly 
eating away the shore. This is what happens on every sea- 
coast. Almost all over the world there is a small but 

1 In height, that is. The distance of coast-line which disappears 
owing to the mere volcanic depression, or the distance of coast-line 
which appears on the other shore from volcanic upheaval (independently 
of river deposits, etc.), depends of course upon the level of the coast. 
It would not, however, be generally more than a yard or two. 



THE KITCHEN-MIDDENS. 35 

constant movement of the solid crust of the earth, which 
is, in fact, only a crust over the molten mass within. Some- 
times, and in some places, the imprisoned mass makes itself 
felt, in violent upheavals, in sudden cracks of the inclosing 
surface, which we call earthquakes and volcanoes; but 
oftener its effect is slight and almost unnoticed. This inter- 
change of state between the kingdoms of the land and of 
the ocean helps to show us the time which has passed be- 
tween the making of the kitchen-middens and our own days. 
There seems little doubt that all along the Danish coast 
of the North Sea, as well as on that of the Baltic, these 
mounds once stood ; but by the gradual undermining of the 
cliffs tne former series have all been swept away, while the 
latter nave, as it appears, been moved a little inland \ and 
we have seen that when there was another cause present 
to form land between the kitchen-middens and the sea, the 
distance has often been increased to several miles. 

Here is another and a still stronger proof of the antiquity 
of the shell mounds. If we examine the shells themselves, 
we find that they all beldng to still living species, and they 
are ah exactly similar to such as might be found in the 
ocean at the present day. But it happens that this is not 
now the case with the shells of the same fish belonging to 
the Baltic Sea. For the waters of this sea are now brackish, 
and not salt ; and since they became so the shell-fish in it 
have gradually grown smaller, and do not now attain half 
their natural size. The oyster, moreover, will not now live 
at all in the Baltic, except near its entrance, where, when- 
ever the wind blows from the north-west, a strong current 
of salt ocean water is poured in. Yet oyster shells are 
especiallv abundant in the kitchen-middens. From all this 
we gatner that, at the time of the making of these mounds, 
there must have been free communication between the 



36 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

ocean and the Baltic Sea. In all probability, in fact, there 
were a number of such passages through the peninsula of 
Jutland, which was consequently at that time an archipelago. 

As ages passed on the descendants of these isolated 

fishermen spread themselves over Europe, and, improving 

in their way of life and mastery over mechanical 

e tumu i found themselves no longer constrained to 

or barrows. ' ° 

trust for their livelihood to the spoils of the sea- 
shallows. They made lances and axes (headed with stone), 
and perfected the use of the bow and arrow until they 
became masters of the game of the forest. And then, after 
a while, man grew out of this hunter stage and domesticated 
other animals besides the dog : oxen, pigs, and geese. No 
longer occupied solely by the search for his daily food, he 
raised mighty tombs — huge mounds of earth enclosing a 
narrow grave — to the departed great men of his race ; and 
he reared up those enormous masses of stone called crom- 
lechs or dolmens — such as we see at Stonehenge — as altars 
to his gods. 1 

The great tombs of earth — which have their fellows not 
in Europe only, but over the greater part of the world — - 
are the special and characteristic features of the stone age. 
The raisers of the kitchen-middens probably preceded the 
men who built the tombs ; for their mode of life was, as we 
should say, the most primitive ; but they were confined to 
a corner of Europe. The tomb-builders formed one of a 
mighty brotherhood of men linked together by the charac- 
teristics of a common civilization. These stone-age sepulchres, 

1 Probably as altars or perhaps as gods themselves. I desire to 
gpeak with great caution of the rude stone monuments of Europe ; 
for of all branches of prehistoric study this has been the least developed 
by modern research. 



THE TUMULI OR BARROWS. 37 

called in England tumuli, barrows, or hows, are hills of 
earth from one to as much as four hundred feet long, by a 
breadth and height of from thirty to fifty feet. They are 
either chambered or unchambered ; that is, they are either 
raised over a small vault made of stone (with perhaps a sort 
of vestibule or entrance chamber), or else a mere hollow 
has been excavated within the mound. In these recesses 
repose the bodies of the dead, some great chieftain or hero 
—the father of his people, who came to be regarded after 
his death with almost the veneration of a god. Beside the 
dead were placed various implements and utensils, left there 
to do him honour or service, to assist him upon the journey 
to that undiscovered country whither he was bound; the 
best of sharpened knives or spear-heads, some jars of their 
rude pottery, once filled with food and drink, porridge, 
rough cakes and beer. 1 And maybe a wife or two, and 
some captives of the last battle were sacrificed to his shade, 
that he might not go quite unattended into that 'other 
world.' The last ceremony, the slaughter of human victims 
to the manes of the dead, was not always, but it must 
have been often, enacted. Out of thirty-two stone-age 
barrows excavated in Wiltshire, seventeen contained only 
one skeleton, and the rest various numbers, from two to 
an indefinite number; and, in one case at least, all the 
skulls save one were found cleft as by a stone hatchet. 

At the doors of the mounds or in an entrance chamber 
many bones have been discovered, the traces of a funeral 
feast, the wake or watch kept on the evening of the burial. 
Likely enough, if the chief were almost deified after death, 

1 It seems highly probable that the invention of some sort of malt 
liquor followed upon the growth of corn. Tacitus mentions such a 
liquor as having been drunk by the Germans of his day. He is doubt- 
less describing a sort of beer. 



38 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

the funeral feast would become periodical. It would be 
considered canny and of good omen that the elders of the 
tribe should meet there at times in solemn conclave, on 
the eve of a warlike expedition or whenever the watchful 
care of the dead hero might avail his descendants. From 
the remains of these feasts, and from the relics of the tombs, 
we have the means of forming some idea of man's acquire- 
ments at this time. His implements are improvements 
upon those of the stone age : in all respects, that is, save in 
this one, that he had now no barbed weapons ; whereas we 
remember that in the caves barbed harpoons are frequently 
met with. Nor, again, had he the artistic talent of the cave- 
dwellers : no traces of New Stone-age drawings have come 
to light. For the rest, his implements and weapons may be 
divided into a few distinctive classes : — 

i. Hammers, hatchets, tomahawks, or chisels ; an instru- 
ment made of a heavy piece of stone brought to a sharp 
cutting edge at one end, and at the other rounded or flat, 
so as to serve the double purpose of a hammer and an axe. 
When these are of an elongated form they are called celts 
or chisels. As subspecies to the hammers and celts we 
have picks and gouges. 2. Arrow and spear heads, which 
differ in size but not much in form, both being long and 
narrow in shape, often closely resembling the leaf of the 
laurel or the bay, sometimes of a diamond shape, but more 
often having the lateral corners nearest to the end which 
fitted into the shaft. Viewed edgeways, they also appear to 
taper towards either end, for while one point was designed 
to pierce the victim, the other was fitted into a cleft handle, 
and bound into it with cord or sinew. Implements have 
been discovered still fitted into their handles. 3. The 
stone knives, which have generally two cutting edges, and 
when this is the case do not greatly differ from the spear- 



THE TUMULI OR BARROWS. 39 

heads, though they are commonly less pointed than the 
latter. And to these three important forms we may add, as 
less important types, a rounded form of implement, generally 
called a scraper, and similar to the scrapers of the palaeo- 
lithic era; stones designed for slinging, net-weights, and 
perhaps corn-grinders or nut-crushers. A few bone imple- 
ments have been found in the tumuli, a pin, a chisel, and a 
knife or so ; but they are very rare, they are never carved, 
and have not one quarter of the interest which belongs to 
the bone implements of the caves. Finally, we must not 
omit to say that in Anhalt, in Germany, a large stone has 
been found which seems to have served the purpose of a 
plough. For there can be little doubt that if some of the 
tumuli belong to a time before the use of domesticated 
animals — save the dog — they last down to a time when 
man not only had tame oxen, pigs, goats, and geese, 1 but 
also sowed and planted, and lived the life of an agricultural 
race ; nor will it be said that such an advance was extra- 
ordinary when we say that the minimum duration of the age 
of polished stone in central Europe was probably two 
thousand years. 

Other relics from the mounds, not less interesting than 
the weapons, are their vessels of pottery ; for here we see 
the earliest traces of another art. This pottery is of a black 
colour, curiously mixed with powdered shells, perhaps to 
strengthen the clay, perhaps for ornament. Its pottery 
belongs to the latter portion of this age of stone, a period 
distinguished not only by the use of domestic animals, but 
also by the growth of cereals. We have said that bones of 
cattle, swine, and in one case of a goose, have been found 
among the refuse of the funeral feasts. But man was still a 

1 But not sheep apparently; at least not in Western Europe. In 
these islands the sheep did not appear before the time of Julius Caesar. 



4 o THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

hunter, as he is to this day, though he had found other 
means of support besides the wild game ; so we also find 
the bones of the red deer and the wild bull, both of which 
supplied him with food. Wolves' teeth, too, have been 
found pierced, so as to be strung into a necklace ; for 
personal adornment formed, in those days as now, part of 
the interest of life. Jet beads have been discovered in large 
numbers, and even some of amber, which seems to have 
been brought from the Baltic to these countries and as far 
south as Switzerland ; and it is known that during the last 
portion of what is, nevertheless, still the stone period, the 
most precious metal of all, gold, was used for ornament. 
Gold is the one metal which is frequently found on the 
surface of the ground, and therefore it was naturally the 
first to come under the eye of man. 

The religion of the mound-builders probably consisted in 
part of the worship of the dead, so that the very tombs them- 
selves, and not the cromlechs only, were a sort of temples. 
And yet they had the deepest dread of the reappearance of 
the departed upon earth — of his ghost. To prevent his 
'walking' they adopted a strange practical form of 
exorcism. They strewed the ground at the grave's mouth 
with sharp stones or broken pieces of pottery, as though a 
ghost could have his feet cut, and by fear of that be kept 
from returning to his old haunts. For ages and ages after 
the days of the mound-builders the same custom lived on of 
which we here see the rise. The same ceremony — turned 
now to an unmeaning rite — was used for the graves of those, 
such as murderers or suicides, who might be expected to 
sleep uneasily in their narrow house. This is the custom 
which is referred to in the speech of the priest to Laertes. 1 
Ophelia had died under such suspicion of suicide, that it 
1 Hamlet, act v., sc. I. 



THE TUMULI OR BARROWS. 41 

was a stretch of their rule, he says, to grant her Christian 
burial. 

' And but the great command o'ersways our order, 
She should in ground unsanctified have lodged 
To the last trumpet : for charitable prayers, 
Shards, flints and pebbles, should be thrown on her.' 
********* 

The body of him for whom the mound was built was not 
buried in the centre, but at one end, and that commonly 
the east, for in most cases the barrows lie east and west. 
It is never stretched out flat, but lies or sits in a crouched 
attitude, the head brought down upon the breast, and the 
knees raised up to meet the chin. So that the dead man 
was generally left facing toward the west — the going down 
of the sun. There cannot but be some significance in this. 
The daily death of the sun has, in all ages and to all people, 
spoken of man's own death, his western course has seemed 
to tell of that last journey upon which all are bent. So that 
the resting-place of the soul is nearly always imagined to lie 
westward in the home of the setting sun. For the rest, 
there seems little doubt that the barrows represent nothing 
else — though upon a large scale — than the dwelling-home 
of the time, and we may believe that the greater part of the 
funeral rights connected with the mounds were very literal 
and unsymbolical. 1 The Eskimo and Lapps of our day 

1 M. Troyon has started the idea that the crouched attitude of the 
dead — repliee, as he describes it : he declares that it does not in the 
least resemble the crouched attitude which men of some races assume 
when sleeping — was imposed upon the dead with a symbolical mean- 
ing, viz. that it was meant to imitate the position of the child in the 
womb of its parent, and as such to enfold the hope of resurrection in 
the act of entombment. The idea is a poetical one, but I much doubt 
whether it has pre-existed in other minds before finding a place in that 
of M. Troyon. The author, however, should be heard in defence of his 
own theory, and may be so in the Revue Arch., ix. 289. 



42 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

dwell in huts no more commodious than the small chambers 
of the barrows, and exceedingly like them in shape; only 
they keep them warm by heaping up over them not earth but 
snow. In these hovels they sit squatting, in an attitude not 
unlike that of the skeleton of the tumuli. Of the human 
remains the skulls are small and round, and have a promi- 
nent ridge over the sockets of the eyes, showing that the 
ancient race was of small stature with round heads — what 
is called brachycephalus, or short-headed, and had over- 
hanging eyebrows; in short, their skeletons bare a con- 
siderable resemblance to those of the modern Laplanders. 

We are still, however, left in darkness about that part of 
the stone-age thought which has left the grandest traces, 
and of which we should so much have wished to be in- 
formed ; I mean the religion. Besides the tumuli we have 
those enormous piles of stone called cromlechs, or dolmens, 
and sometimes miscalled Druid circles — such as the well- 
known Stonehenge ; these cromlechs were, we may believe, 
temples or sacred places. Each arrangement of the stones is 
generally like a simple portico, made by placing one enormous 
block upon two others ; and these porticoes are sometimes 
arranged in circles, as at Stonehenge, sometimes in long 
colonnades, as at Carnac in Brittany. Lesser dolmens have 
been found in most European countries. There can be 
little doubt that these huge monuments possessed a 
religious character. And here is one proof of the fact. As 
a rule, the grave-mounds — the tumuli — are built upon 
elevations commanding a considerable prospect, and it is 
rare to find two within sight. Yet over Salisbury Plain, and 
the part about Stonehenge, they are much more numerous, 
as many as a hundred and fifty having been discovered in 
this neighbourhood, as though all the ground about this 
great cromlech were a hallowed region, and it were a desired 



THE TUMULI OR BARROWS. 43 

privilege to be buried within such sacred precincts. Of the 
worship which these stone altars commemorate we know 
absolutely nothing. There seems to be no reasonable 
doubt that they belong to the period we are describing. 
The name Druid Circles, which has been sometimes given 
them, is an absurd anachronism, for, as we shall have 
occasion to see later on, the ancestors of the Kelts (or 
Celts), to whom the Druidical religion belonged, were 
probably at this time still living on the banks of the Oxus 
in Central Asia ; at any rate they had not yet migrated to 
Brittany or to Great Britain. Thus, though we must 
continue to wonder how these people could ever have 
raised such enormous stones as altars of their religion, the 
nature of that religion itself is hidden from us. , 

The tumuli and the relics which they contain are the 
truest representatives of the second stone age which have 
come down to us. The barrows raise their summits in 
every land, and the characteristic features of the remains 
found in them are the same for each. We must judge that 
they, that the most genuine stone-age tumuli, arose during 
the greatest extension of the stone-age races, before any new 
peoples had come to dispute their territory. What the 
kitchen-middens show in the germ, they show in its per- 
fection — all the perfection attainable by it. 

We have already enumerated the most important forms of 
weapons and implements found in these tumuli ; and there 
would be no use in entering upon a lengthy verbal descrip- 
tion of what would be so much better illustrated by draw- 
ings. The books enumerated in the Appendix give abundant 
illustrations of the stone-age remains. One caution, how- 
ever, we need to give the reader. This second stone age 
is called, we know, the age of polished stone. But, as has 
been already said, that by no means implies that all the imple* 



44 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

merits made in these days were polished. On the contrary, 
certain stone manufactures, notably arrow-heads, were never 
polished. They went on being made by chipping, not only 
during the whole of the second stone age, but far into the 
first metal age, when bronze had been introduced and was 
used for the manufacture of numerous weapons and imple- 
ments. The grinding of the edges of certain sharp weapons 
is a more important characteristic than the polishing of the 
whole or a portion of their surface. But this grinding was 
not universally employed, but used generally only for the 
larger implements. 

And now, having dealt with the remains from the tumuli, 

the flower, as we may call them, of the second stone period, 

we pass on to a third series of remains, which 

\L 116* Jfll/p 

.,, K must be in part contemporary with the stone- 
villages. L L J 

using men, and have continued on and been 
absorbed into the metal age, which next supervened. These 
remains came from what are called the lake-dwellings, and 
though traces of such dwellings have been found in many 
countries in Europe, in our isles among others, still the 
chief provenance of the lake-dwellings, so far as our dis- 
coveries yet go, is in Switzerland and the north of Italy. But 
let it not be supposed that these lake-dwellings extended 
over a short period. A variety of separate pieces of evi- 
dence enforce upon us the conclusion that the stone age 
in Europe endured for at least two thousand years. Even 
the latter portion of that epoch will allow a cycle vast 
enough for the lives of the lake-dwellers ; for the dwellings 
did not come to an end at the end of the age of stone, they 
only began in it. They were seen by Roman eyes almost 
as late as the beginning of our own era. 

For at least two thousand years, then, we may say, the 



THE LAKE VILLAGES. 45 

men who lived in the country of the Swiss lakes, and those 
of Northern Italy, adopted for the sake of security the 
custom of making their dwellings, not upon the solid 
ground, but upon platforms constructed with infinite trouble 
above the waters of the lake. And the way they set about 
it was in this wise : Having chosen their spot — if attainable, 
a sunny shore protected as much as possible from storms, 
and having a lake-bottom of a soft and sandy nature — they 
proceeded to drive in piles, composed of tree-stems taken 
from the neighbouring forests, from four to eight inches in 
diameter. These piles had to be felled, and afterwards 
sharpened, either by fire or a stone axe, then driven in from 
a raft by the use of ponderous stone mallets ; and when we 
have said that in one instance the number of piles of a lake 
village has been estimated at from 40,000 to 50,000, the 
enormous labour of the process will be apparent. This 
task finished, the piles were levelled at a certain height 
above the water, and a platform of boards was fastened on 
with pegs. On the platform were erected huts, probably 
square or oblong in shape, not more than twenty feet or so 
in length, adapted however for the use of a single family, 
and generally furnished, it would appear, with a hearth- 
stone and a corn-crusher apiece. The huts were made 
of wattle-work, coated on both sides with clay. Stalls 
were provided for the cattle, and a bridge of from only ten 
or twelve to as much as a hundred yards in length led 
back to the mainland. Over this the cattle must have 
been driven every day, at least in summer, to pasture on 
the bank ; and no doubt the village community separated 
each morning for the various occupations of fishing, for 
hunting, for agriculture, and for tending the cattle. As 
may be imagined, these wooden villages were in peculiar 
danger from fire, and a very large number have suffered 



46 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

destruction in this way; a circumstance fortunate for 
modern science, for many things which had been partially 
burnt before falling into the lake have, by the coating of 
charcoal formed round them, been made impervious to 
the corroding influence of the water. Thus we have 
preserved their very grain itself, and their loaves or cakes 
of crushed but not ground meal. The grains are of various 
kinds of wheat and barley, oats, and millet. 1 

It is natural to ask for what object the enormous trouble 
of erecting these lake-dwellings could have been under- 
taken ; and the only answer which can be given is, that it 
was to protect their inhabitants from their enemies. 
Whether each village formed a separate tribe and made 
war upon its neighbours, or whether the lake-dwellers were 
a peaceful race fleeing from more savage people of the 
mainland, is uncertain. There is nothing which leads us 
to suppose they were a race of a warlike character, and 
as far as the arts of peace go they had advanced consi- 
derably upon the men of the tumuli. More especially do 
the woven cloths, sometimes worked with simple but not 
inartistic patterns, excite our admiration. They had their 
trade too. Ornaments of amber are frequent, and amber 
must have been brought from the Baltic ; while in one settle- 
ment, believed to be of the stone age, the presence of a glass 
bead would seem to imply indirect commerce with Egypt, 
the only country in which the traces of glass manufacture 
at this remote period have been found. 2 It is believed by 
good authorities, that the stone age in Europe came to an 
end about two thousand years before Christ, or at a date 

1 Some of the varieties of grain found in these lake-dwellings are not 
otherwise known to botanists. 

8 The Phoenicians are said by tradition to have invented the manu- 
facture of glass. But there is no proof of this. 



THE LAKE VILLAGES. 47 

which is generally considered to be about that of Abraham ; 
and its shortest duration, as we saw, must also be considered 
to be two thousand years. 

These men of the lakes stand in no degree behind the 
mound-builders for the material elements of civilization. 
Nay, they are in some respects before them. Their life 
seems to have been more confined and simple than that 
which was going on in other parts of Europe. Its very 
peacefulness and simplicity gave men the opportunity for 
perfecting some of their arts. Thus their agriculture was 
more careful and more extended than that of the men of 
the tumuli. Their cattle would appear to have been 
numerous ; all were stall-fed upon the island home ; if in 
the morning driven out to pasture over the long bridge to 
the mainland, they were brought home again at night. To 
agriculture these lake-dwellers had added the special art 
of gardening, for they cultivated fruit-trees ; and they span 
hemp and flax, and even constructed — it is believed — some 
sort of loom for weaving cloth. Yet for all that, if in these 
respects they were superior to the men of the tumuli, their 
life was probably more petty and narrow than the others'. 
There must have been some grandeur in the ideas of men 
who could have built those enormous tombs and raised 
those wondrous piles of altar-stones. If the first were made 
in honour of their chiefs, the existence of such chiefs implies 
a power in the stone-age men of expanding into a wide 
social life ; so too the immense labour which the raising of 
the cromlechs demanded argues strong if not the most 
elevated religious ideas. And it has been often and truly 
remarked that these two elements of progress, social and 
religious life, are always intimately associated. It is in a 
common worship more than in common language that we 
find the beginning of nationalities, It was so in Greece. 



48 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

The city life grew up around the temple of a particular 
tutelary deity, and the associations of cities arose from their 
association in the worship at some common shrine. The 
common nationality of the Hellenes was kept alive more 
than anything in the quadrennial games in honour of the 
Olympian Zeus, just as the special citizenship of Athens 
found expression in the peculiar worship of the virgin 
goddess Athene. So we may well argue from the great 
stone remains, that man had even then made some progress 
in political life. They show us the extended conditions of 
tribal government. But the lake-dwellers only give us a 
picture of the simplest and narrowest form of the village 
community. It is with them a complete condition of social 
equality ; there is no appearance of any grade of rank ; no 
hut on these islands is found larger or better supplied or 
more cared for than the rest. A condition of things not 
unlike that which we find in Switzerland at the present day ; 
one favourable to happiness and contentment, to improve- 
ment in the simpler arts, but not to wide views of life, or to 
any great or general progress. 

And now let us, before we bid adieu to the men of the 
stone age, recount our gains, and see what picture the 
The civiliza- researches of pre-historic science allow us to draw 
tion of the of the progress of mankind from its earliest 
stone ages, condition to that in which we now find it. We 
will forget for a moment the great gap which intervenes 
between the two stone ages, the age of unpolished stone 
and the age of polished stone, and simply following step by 
step the changes in human implements much as if we were 
walking round the cases of some well-arranged museum, we 
will note, as we pass it, each marked improvement or new 
acquisition in the arts of life, 



THE CIVILIZATION OF THE STONE AGES. 49 

1. To begin, then, with the men of the river drift — so far 
as we can judge, the rudest and most uncultured of all. It 
is not certain that these men had so much as wooden 
handles to their implements of stone, but it is probable that 
they had them. As we have said, they had only two or 
three marked varieties in these weapons. How little ad- 
vance there seems from the state of simply using or hurling 
the stones in the state in which they are found ! At the 
same time, it must be said that the implements of wood or 
horn, pointed stakes or even javelins, which these early men 
may have had would almost certainly have perished. 

Nor, again, is there any evidence that the men of the drift 
period were cognizant of the use of fire, though here it is 
more likely that they were than that they were not. 

2. When we come to the cave-dwellers we see marked 
signs of a higher civilization. The first and most important 
of these signs undoubtedly is the evidence of knowledge how 
to procure fire. We see a much greater variety in the 
implements used by the ,cave-dwellers. This, no doubt, is 
due in part to the disappearance of a portion of the 
implements of the drift age ; but still we must take things 
as we find them. And putting side by side the specimens 
of the drift-implements and the cave-implements, we are at 
once struck by the superiority of the latter in make and in 
variety of form. 

Thirdly, as has already been pointed out, we have here 
the earliest traces of art. On that subject it is not necessary 
again to dwell. 

3. And now pass on to the second stone age, and see 
what progress man has made in the interval which separates 
the two periods. We begin with the society represented by 

E 



So THE DA WN OF HISTORY. 

the kitchen-middens. We do not possess any certainly 
polished-stone implements from these refuse-heaps. But I 
do not lay any great stress upon the invention of the art of 
polishing or even of grinding the stone ; though that was 
not without importance, for it enabled the men of the 
second stone age to make use of much harder and more 
durable sorts of stone for their cutting implements. The 
earliest stone-age men made their implements of all sorts 
almost exclusively of flints, because the flint was a stone not 
difficult to chip into shape and to give an edge to by chipping. 
But when it comes to polishing or grinding instead of 
chipping an edge upon stones, there are a variety of other 
kinds of stone which are much more durable and much 
more serviceable than flints are, for the very reason that they 
are not liable to chip, and these stones (jade, granite, green- 
stone, obsidian, or one or other of the marbles, for example) 
we find a good deal employed during the latter stone age. 

What, however, is more significant than would be the use 
of polished-stone implements by the kitchen-midden men is 
the evidence of their use of canoes, and therefore the 
evidence that they understood the art of navigation. 

Next after that we must place the use of the bow, which 
also was probably known to the earliest men of the polished- 
stone age, but not to those of the preceding era. 

Finally, we have the beginning of domestication of 
animals in the domestication of the dog. But we have as 
yet no beginning of agriculture. 

4. Pass on to the men who raised the tumuli and we find 
still further signs of progress. Of these the tumuli them- 
selves are the most significant. For in them we see the 
beginning of the art of building. I do not say that houses 
were unknown to the kitchen-midden men ; only that we 



THE CIVILIZATION OF THE STONE AGES. 51 

have no proof that they lived in houses ; and we are here 
taking the evidences of advancing civilization as we come 
across them. In the case of the still earlier cave-dwellers 
we may take it for granted that the art of house-building 
was unknown to them, and quite as much so to the men of 
the river drift. 1 

True, the tumuli are not houses ; they are tombs. But 
the men who could raise these tombs could raise houses 
likewise, and there can be little doubt that the architecture 
of the combs, here and throughout the history of mankind, 
was modelled upon the architecture of the houses. Where- 
fore we may assume that these last were low and narrow 
chambers, a sort of constructed caves, so to speak, which is 
just what we should expect the earliest houses to be. We 
should expect that the first advance from cave-dwelling or 
burrowing in the ground would be to raise an artificial 
mountain and burrow within that. But soon the insecurity 
of this house would become apparent, and the next advance 
— no mean one, however, — would be the propping of 
stones upon others to make a chamber before the earth was 
heaped up in the tumulus, and when that step had been 
reached the art of house-building had begun. 

We might call the next step forward the acquisition of a 
religion, of which the first signs are apparent in the cromlechs 
of this age. In this case, again, we only follow the testimony 
of the remains that have been discovered in the order in 
which they have come to light. It would be far too much 
to say that the earlier stone-age men were without religious 

1 Of course the making of very rude huts of branches and leaves may 
have been practised by these — such huts as formed the only shelter of 
the Tasmanians down to our day. For an imaginative description of 
the most primitive house, see Violet de Due, The Houses of Men in all 
Ages, ch. i. 



52 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

observances. All we can say is, that the first certain re- 
mains of these belong to the time of the tumuli and the 
cromlechs. The reasons which lead us to believe that 
these last, the cromlechs, had a religious character have 
been already given. 

Commerce was not unknown even to the cave-dwellers, 
but the first proofs of anything like a distant commerce 
come to us from the date of the grave-mounds. 

The domestic animals of the tumuli begin to be numerous 
— oxen, pigs, goats, and geese, — though these remains are 
not found in the earliest mounds. And there is likewise 
among them some trace of agriculture. 

Finally, traces of the art of pottery-making appear for the 
first time in these graves. 

4. The village communities show an advance to the most 
undoubted use of agriculture, to the planting of fruit-trees, 
to the weaving of cloths, and a much more extended practice 
of domestication than obtained among the men of the grave- 
mounds. 

Thus we see that as long ago as the stone age, before 
man had yet discovered any metal except, maybe, gold, he 
had advanced so far as to have discovered the most 
necessary arts of life, hunting, fishing, navigation (in some 
form), the domestication of animals, agriculture, planting, 
weaving, the making of garments — not of skin only, but also 
of linen or cloth — and the making of pottery. 

And now let us note one other thing — the point where 
the stone age seems to approach most nearly to the borders 
of actual history. History begins in Egypt. For no con- 
tinuous Biblical history exists for the days prior to Abraham. 
But in Egypt, for many centuries before Abraham, we have 
a continuous history, or at least continuous chronicles and 



THE CIVILIZATION OF THE STONE AGES. 53 

dynastic lists, whose authenticity is admitted, and the re- 
mains of no mean civilization in the buildings contemporary 
with these earliest chronicles. 

Egyptian history may be said to begin with the builders of 
the pyramids. But the pyramids themselves are nothing 
else than the children of the tumuli of the second stone 
age. We may call them a sort of crystallized tumuli — 
barrows of stone instead of earth. But, in truth, the earliest 
pyramids were probably not built of stone. It is generally 
believed that the stone pyramids which we see to-day at Giza 
and Sakkara were preceded by pyramids of unbaked brick. 
And what are such buildings of unbaked brick save carefully 
raised mounds of earth? Here, then, we get the nearest 
meeting-point between the stone age and the age of history. 

Again, the principle upon which were constructed the 
Egyptian tombs — of which the pyramids were only the 
most conspicuous forms — were precisely the same as the 
principles which governed the construction of the more 
elaborate barrows. These last had not only a chamber for 
the dead. This chamber was in many cases approached by 
a passage also made of stones covered with earth; and 
there can be no question that the mouth of the tomb was 
used as a sort of ante-room in which the relatives of the dead 
might hold their wake, or funeral feast. Here have been 
found the traces of fires, the remains of animals, fragments 
of vessels of pottery, etc., used or consumed in the feasts. 
We may believe that the ceremony was repeated at stated 
intervals. The very same principle governed the con- 
struction of the Egyptian tombs. These likewise (in their 
earliest known forms) consisted of an inner tomb and of an 
outer chamber ; generally between the one and the other 
there was a passage. The outer chamber is that to which 
archaeologists have given the name of mastaba. In it 



54 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

the relatives of the dead continued year after year to keep 
a funeral feast in his memory. Or we may say more than 
in memory of the dead — with the dead, we may say. For 
the essence of the feast, the fumes of the baked meats, was 
thought to penetrate along the passage and reach the 
mummy himself in his dark chamber. 

Thus we come to the end of the stone age or ages. The 
next great discovery which man made was that of the 

Ao-es of metals. Not iron at first ; before iron was dis- 
bronze and covered there supervened the age known as the 
iron. Bronze Age, when copper and tin were known 
but not iron, and all the most important implements were 
made of that mixture of copper and tin — bronze, the 
hardest substance then obtainable. In some countries the 
discovery of the metals was natural, and one age followed 
upon the other in gradual sequence. But in Europe it was 
not so. The men of the bronze age were a new race, 
sallying out of the East to dispossess the older inhabitants, 
and if in some places the bronze men and the stone men 
seem to have gone on for a time side by side, the general 
character of the change is that of a sudden break. 

Therefore we do not now proceed to speak of the cha- 
racteristic civilization of the bronze age. As will be seen 
hereafter, the bringers of the new weapons belonged to a 
race concerning whom we have much ampler means of 
information than is possessed for the first inhabitants of 
these lands ; and we are spared the necessity of drawing 
all our knowledge from a scrutiny of their arms or tombs. 
But before we can satisfactorily show who were the suc- 
cessors of the stone-age men in Europe, and whence they 
came, we must turn aside towards another inquiry, viz. into 
the origin of language. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE. 

We have looked upon man fashioning the first implements 
and weapons and houses which were ever made ; we now 
turn aside and ask what were the first of those 
immaterial instruments, those 'aeriform, mystic' f ^ 
legacies which were handed down and gradually- 
improved from the time of the earliest inhabitants of our 
globe ? Foremost among these, long anterior to the ' metal- 
lurgic and other manufacturing skill? comes language. 
With us, in whose minds thought and speech are so bound 
together as to be almost inseparable, the idea that language 
is an instrument which through long ages has been slowly 
improved to its present perfection, seems difficult of credit. 
We think of early man having the same ideas and expressing 
them as readily as we do now ; but this he could not really 
have done. Not, indeed, that we have any reason to 
believe that there was a time when man had no language at 
all ; but it seems certain that long ages- were necessary before 
this instrument could be wrought to the fineness in which we 
find it, and to which, in all the languages with which we are 
likely to become acquainted, we are accustomed. A rude 
iron knife or spear-head seems a simple and natural thing to 



56 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

make. But we know that before it could be made iron had 
to be discovered, and the art of extracting iron from the 
ore ; and, as a matter of fact, we know that thousands of 
years passed before the iron spear-head was a possibility; 
thousands of years spent in slowly improving the weapons 
of stone, and passing on from them to the weapons of 
bronze. So, too, with language ; simple as it seems at first 
sight to fit the word on to the idea, and early as we 
ourselves learn this art, a little thought about what language 
is will show us how much we owe to the ages which have 
gone before. 

To understand fully the department of study called the 

science of language considerable linguistic knowledge is 

necessary. But to grasp many of the general 

• i principles of this science, and many of the most 

of words important facts which it teaches, we do not need 

' significant ' an y Sll ch wide knowledge. In fact, a little 

and ' msig- thoughtful examination of any single tongue (his 

own, whichever it may be) would teach a person 

many things which without thought he would be inclined to 

pass over as matters of course or matters of no consequence. 

In truth, in this science of language what we need, even 

before we need a very wide array of facts, is what is called 

the scientific method in dealing with the facts which we 

possess. But, again, this which we call the scientific method 

is really represented by two qualities which have less 

pretentious names — observation and common sense. 

Let us begin then by, so to say, challenging our own 
language, our English as we find it to-day, and see what 
hints we can gain from it of the formation of language as a 
whole and of its origin. An ounce of information gained in 
this wise, by examination and the use of our own common 
sense, is worth a much greater bulk of knowledge gained 



'SIGNIFICANT' AND 'INSIGNIFICANT' WORDS. 57 

second-hand from books, and merely remembered as facts 
divorced from their causes- 
Take any sentence, and place that, so to say, under a 
microscope, or under the dissec ting-knife — take the opening 
sentence of this chapter, for example. 

"We have looked upon man fashioning the first im- 
plements and weapons and houses that were ever made.' 
Let us look at these few words alone. 
The first thing we have to notice about this sentence, and 
any other sentence almost that we could anywhere find, is 
that the words which compose it fall into two distinct classes, 
the classes of what I will call meaning and meaningless, or 
significant and /^-significant words. In the first class fall 
the words we, looked, man, fashioning, implements, weapons, 
houses, made. These I call ' meaning ' or ' significant ' 
words, because, if we isolate each one and utter it alone, it 
will call up some image to the mind — we, weapons, fashioning, 
houses, made, and so forth : the image may be pretty clear 
or it may be (in the case of the verbs it is) somewhat hazy. 
But in every case some image or some idea does rise before 
the mind when any of these words is pronounced. Have 
and were I exclude for the moment from either class. The 
words of the second class, then, from the sentence chosen 
are — upon, the, and, ever. Of the first three, at any rate, 
there can be no difficulty as to why they are classed as the 
meaningless or insignificant words of the sentence. Isolated 
from the words of the first class, upon, the, or andean by no 
means possibly call up any image or suggest any idea to the 
mind. 

Now, if you take any implement whose manufacture the 
world has ever seen, unless it be of the most primitive 
description imaginable, you will find it really devisable into 
two parts, upon much the same principle that we have here 



58 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

resolved our typical sentence into two primary divisions ; 
it will consist of the essential part, the part which by itself 
would be useful, and the unessential adjunct which is 
designed to assist the usefulness of the other portion, but 
which is useless by itself — or if not useless by itself, it is 
useless for the purposes for which the implement we are 
concerned with is made. All handles meant to assist in 
the use of an implement, be it a stone axe or a most 
elaborate modern weapon, form such an adjunct to the 
essential part. Such useful and by comparison useless parts 
are the blade and the handle of a knife, the barrel and the 
stock of a gun, the carrying portion of the wheelbarrow and 
the wheel, the share — the shearing or cutting portion of a 
plough — and the wooden framework ; and so forth. There 
is no need to multiply examples. Nor, I think, is there any 
need to insist further how strictly analogous the two classes 
of words here distinguished are to the two parts of any other 
implement invented by man. It goes almost of course that 
the essential portion of any implement is the portion which 
was invented first, that knife-blades were invented before 
knife-handles, barrows before barrow-wheels, etc. Where- 
fore it seems to follow of course that, of the two classes of 
words whereof language consists — whereof all languages 
consist — the meaning and the meaningless words, the 
first were the earliest invented or discovered. This is the 
same as saying that language once consisted altogether of 
words which had a definite meaning attaching to them 
even when uttered by themselves, and consequently that the 
words of the second class grew, so to say, out of the words 
of the first class. 

These are the conclusions which a mere examination of a 
single language, our own, under the guidance of observation 
and common sense, would force upon us ; always supposing 



ORIGIN OF SPEECH UNDISCOVERABLE. 59 

our language to be a representative one. And these con- 
clusions are strengthened when we come to look a little into 
the history of words, so far as we can trace it. 

So far back, therefore, we may go in the history of language 
to a time when all the words which men used were words 
which by themselves evoked distinct ideas. Relegating 
these words, as far as we can, into the classes which 
grammarians have invented for the different parts of speech, 
we see that the significant words are all, as a rule, either 
nouns (ox pro-nouns), adjectives, or verbs; that the insigni- 
ficant words are, as a rule, adverbs, prepositions, and con- 
junctions — what, in fact, are called particles, fragments of 
speech. I say, as a rule, for both divisions. The pro- 
nouns and the auxiliary verbs, for example, are very 
difficult to classify; and it depends rather on their use in 
each individual sentence, to which division they are to be 
relegated. 

But though we have now learnt to distinguish the words 
which by themselves convey definite ideas, and those others 
whose meaning depends* upon the first class, we origin of 
are as far as ever from understanding how words, speech un- 
whether of one kind or the other, come to have discoverable, 
the significance which they have for us. Book — no sooner 
have we pronounced the word than an idea more or less 
distinct comes into our mind. The thought and the sound 
seem inseparable, and we cannot remember the time when 
they were not so. Yet the connection between the thought 
and the sound is not necessary. In fact, a sound which 
generally comes connected with one idea may — if we are 
engaged at the time upon a language not our own — enter 
our minds, bringing with it an idea quite unconnected with 
the first. Share and chere, plea 2X\Aplie,feel and viel ( German), 
are examples in point ; and the same thing is shown by the 



60 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

numerous sounds in our language which have two or more 
quite distinct meanings, as for example — ware and were, and 
(with most people) where too. Rite and right and wright are 
pronounced precisely alike ; therefore there can be no 
reason why one sound should convey one idea more than 
another. In other words, the idea and the sound have 
an arbitrary, not a natural connection. We have been 
taught to make the sound 'book' for the idea book, but 
had we been brought up by French parents the sound 
' livre ' would have seemed the natural one to make. 

So that this wondrous faculty of speech has, like those 
other faculties of which Carlyle speaks, been handed down 
on impalpable vehicles of sound through the ages. Never, 
perhaps, since the time of our first parents has one person 
from among the countless millions who have been born had 
to invent for himself a way of expressing his thoughts in 
words. This is alone a strange thing enough. Impossible 
as it is to imagine ourselves without speech, we may ask the 
question — What should we do if we were ever left in such a 
predicament? Should we have any guide in fitting the 
sound on to the idea ? Share and chere, feel and viel — 
among these unconnected notions is there any reason why 
we should wed our speech to one rather than another? 
Clearly there is no reason. Yet in the case which we 
imagined of a number of rational beings who had to invent 
a language for the first time, if they are ever to come to an 
understanding at all there must be some common impulse 
which makes more than one choose the same sound for a 
particular idea. How, for instance, we may ask, was it 
with our first parents ? They have passed on to all their 
descendants for ever the idea of conveying thought by 
sound, and all the great changes which have since come 
into the languages of the world have been gradual and, so 



ORIGIN OF SPEECH UNDISCOVERABLE. 61 

to say, natural. But this first invention of the idea of 
speech is of quite another character. 

Here we are brought to the threshold of that impene- 
trable mystery * the beginning of things,' and here we must 
pause. We recognize this faculty of speech as a thing 
mysterious, unaccountable, belonging to that supernatural 
being, man. There must, one would think, have been and 
must be in us a something which causes our mouth to echo 
the thought of the heart; and originally this echo must 
have been spontaneous and natural, the same for all alike. 
Now it is a mere matter of tradition and instruction, the 
sound we use for the idea ; but at first the two must have 
had some subtle necessary connection, or how could one of 
our first parents have known or guessed what the other 
wished to say ? Just as every metal has its peculiar ring, 
it is as though each impression on the mind rang out its 
peculiar word from the tongue. 1 Or was it like the faint 
tremulous sound which glasses give when music is played 
near? The outward object or the inward thought called 
out a sort of mimicry, a distant echo — not like, but yet 
born of the other — on the lips. These earliest sounds may 
perhaps still sometimes be detected. In the sound flo or 
flu, which in an immense number of languages stands 
connected with the idea of flowing and of rivers, do we 
not recognize some attempt to catch the smooth yet rushing 
sound of water? And again, in the sound gra or gri, 
which is largely associated with the notion of grinding, 
cutting, or scraping, 2 there is surely something of this in 

1 The simile is Mr. Max Miiller's. 

2 In English we have grind, grate, (s)cra(pe), grave (German graben, 
1 to dig ; ' Eng. ( grub. ') All words for writing mean cutting, because 
all writing was originally graving on a stone : thus the Latin scribo 
(corrupted in the French to ecris), in the Greek is grapho, in the 
German schreibc. These words, as well as the English write, are 



62 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

the guttural harshness of the letters, which make the tongue 
grate, as it were, against the roof of the mouth. 

It does not, however, seem probable that the earliest 
words were mere imitations of the sounds produced by the 
objects they designed to express, such as are some of the 
words of child-language whereby dogs are called bow-wows 
and lambs are called baas. Nor need we wonder at this, 
when we note the principles upon which other sorts of 
language — expressive actions, for instance — are conceived 
and used. If we intend to express the idea of motion by 
an expressive gesture, we do not make any copy of the 
mode of that motion. We say ' Go,' and we dart out our 
hand, half to show that the person we are addressing is to 
go in the direction which we point out, or that he is to 
keep away from us ; half, again, to give the idea of his move- 
ment by the rapidity of our own. But if we wanted to 
convey this last idea by mere imitation we should move 
our legs rapidly and not our arms. 

It might be thought that the study of the gesture-language 
which has been used by men, especially the gesture- 
language of deaf-mutes, who have no other, would give us 
the best insight into the origin of language among mankind. 
But in reality the results of such a study are not very 
satisfactory ■ and for this reason, that the deaf-mute has in 
every case been in contact with one or more persons who 
possessed speech, and whose ideas were therefore entirely 
formed by the possession and the inheritance of language. 
This inherited language they translate into signs for the 
benefit of the deaf-mute, while the latter is still a baby and 
incapable of inventing language; wherefore it, in its turn, 
inherits a language almost as much as its parent has done, 

known to be all from the same root ; it is not pretended that they are 
proofs of a natural selection of sound ; but they may be instances of it. 



GROWTH OF 'INSIGNIFICANT' WORDS. 63 

though it is a language of gesture and not of spoken words. 1 

It is a fact, however, that deaf-mutes who cannot hear the 

sounds they make, do nevertheless articulate certain sounds 

which they constantly associate with the same ideas. These 

seem to bring us very near the language-making faculty of 

man. Lists of these sounds have been made, but they are 

not such that we can draw any conclusions touching the 

natural or universal association of sound and sense. 

The origin of human speech and the mode of its first 

operation are therefore un discoverable. We can place no 

measure to the rapidity with which the first _ , e 

1 1 • j 1 • 1 c Growth of 

created man may have obtained his stock of the c ms [„. 

words of our first class ; as Adam is described nificant ' 
naming each one of the animals among whom words out 
he lived. All these beginnings lie beyond the ° t e ^f* 
ken of linguistic science. But even when he 
was furnished as fully as we choose to suppose with a 
class of words which had a meaning of their own, there was 
still the second class whose invention must have followed 
upon the invention of the first. The adverbs, prepositions, 
conjunctions, particles, — the words which meant to, and, at, 
but, when, — these we have already seen must as a whole have 
come into use later than the other class of words. 

This, then, we may fairly call the second stage in the 
growth of language, the making of these auxiliary words to 
enforce the meanhg of the first class of words. And at the 
first moment it might seem impossible to imagine how these 
words could ever have come into existence. Given a 
certain word-making faculty, we can understand how man- 
kind got sounds to express such ideas as man, head, hard, 
red. But how he could ever have acquired sounds to 

1 The reader, however, may be referred to Tylor's Early History of 
Mankind, ^h. iv., for much interesting information on the subject. 



\ 



64 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

express such vague notions as at, by, and, it is much less 
easy to conceive. A closer observation, however, even of 
our own language, and a wider knowledge of languages 
generally, lead to the conclusion that all the words of the 
second class, the auxiliary words, sprang from words of 
the first class ; that every insignificant word has grown out 
of a word which had its own significance ; that, for instance, 
with, by, and, have descended from roots (now lost) which, 
if placed alone, would have conveyed as much idea to the 
mind as pen, ink, or paper does to us. 

This, I say, we should guess even from an examination 
of our own language alone. For the process is still going on. 
Take the word even, as used in the sentence which we ha\ e 
just written : ' Even from an examination.' Here even is an 
adverb, quite meaningless when used alone, at least as an 
adverb ; but if we see it alone it becomes another word, an 
adjective, a meaning word, bringing before us the idea of 
two things hanging level. ' Even from ' is nonsense as an 
idea with nothing to follow it, but 'even weights' is a 
perfectly clear and definite notion, and each of the separate 
words even and weights give us clear and definite notions 
too. It is the same with just, which is both adverb and 
adjective. 'Just as' brings no thought into the mind, but 
1 just man ' and just and man, separately or together, do. 
While or whilst are meaningless ; but, ' a while,' or ' to 
while ' — to loiter — are full of meaning. In each case the 
meaningless word came from the meaning word, and was first 
used as a sort of metaphor, and then the metaphorical part 
was lost sight of. Ago is a meaningless word by itself, but 
it is really only a changed form of the obsolete word agone, 
which was an old past participle of the verb ' to go.' 

And we might find many instances of words in the same 
process of transformation in other languages. The English 



GROWTH OF 'INSIGNIFICANT' WORDS. 65 

word not is meaningless, and just as much so are the French 
pas and point in the sense of not ; but in the sense of 'foot step, 
or point, they have meaning enough. Originally 77 ne veut 
pas meant, metaphorically, ' He does not wish a step of your 
wishes,' ' He does not go a footstep with you in your wish ; > 
77 ne veut point, l He does not go a point with you in your 
wish.' Nowadays all this metaphorical meaning is gone, 
except to the eye of the grammarian. People recognize 
that// ne veut point is rather stronger than 77 ne veut pas, but 
it never occurs to them to ask why. 

There are so many of these curious examples that one 
is tempted to go on choosing instances; but we confine 
ourselves to one more. Our word yes is a word which by 
itself is quite incapable of calling up a picture in our minds, 
but the word is or ' it is,' though the idea it conveys is very 
abstract, and, so to say, intangible — as compared, for in- 
stance, with such verbs as move, beat — nevertheless belongs 
to the ' significant ' class. Now, it happens that the Latin 
language used the word est ' it is ' where we should now use 
the word 'yes;' and it Still further happens that om yes x is 
probably the same as the German es, and was used in the 
same sense of it is as well. Instead of the meaningless 
word ' yes ' the Romans used the word est ' it is,' and our 
own ancestors expressed the same idea by saying ' it.' Still 
more. It is well known that French is in the main a 
descendant from the Latin, not the Latin of Rome, but the 
corrupter Latin which was spoken in Gaul. Now these 
Latin-speaking Gauls did not, for some reason, say est, l it 
is,' for yes, as the Romans did ; but they used a pronoun, 
either ille, 'he,' or hoc, 'this.' When, therefore, a Gaul 
desired to say 'yes,' he nodded, and said he or else this, 

1 Yes is probably not the same word as the German ja (whose 
significant form is lost), though our yea is. 

F 



66 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

meaning 'He is so,' or 'This is so.' As it happens the Gauls 
of the north said tile, and those of the south said hoc, and 
these words gradually got corrupted into two meaningless 
words, out and oc. It is well known that the people in the 
south of France were especially distinguished by using the 
word oc instead of out for ' yes,' so that their i dialect ' got 
to be called the langue oToc, and this word Languedoc gave 
the name to a province of France. Long before that time, 
however, we may be sure, both the people of the langue d'otl, 
or langue d'oui, and those of the langue doc had forgotten that 
their words for ' yes ' had originally meant ' he ' and ' this.' 

We can, from the instances above given, form a pretty 
good guess at the way in which the auxiliary or meaningless 
class of sounds came into use in any language. Each of 
these must once have had a distinct significance by itself, 
then (getting meanwhile a little changed in form probably) 
it gradually lost the separate meaning and became only a 
particle of speech, only an adjunct to other words. In 
another way, we may say that before man spoke of ' on the 
rock' or 'under the rock' he must have used some ex- 
pression like ' head of rock,' or more literally ' head rock ' 
and 'foot rock;' and that as time went on, new words 
coming into use for head and foot, these earlier ones dropped 
down to be mere adjuncts, and men forgot that they had 
ever been anything else. Just so no ordinary Frenchman 
knows that his out and il are both sprung from the same 
Latin tile; nor does the ordinary Englishman recognize 
that ago is a past participle of ' go ; ' nor again, to take a 
new instance, does, perhaps, the ordinary German recognize 
that his gewzss, ' certainly,' is merely an abbreviation of the 
past participle gewi'ssen, ' known.' 

We have now followed the growth of language through 



ROOT-SOUNDS. 67 



two of its stages, first, the coining of the principal or essen- 
tial parts of speech, the nouns, adjectives, and verbs; and 
secondly, the coining at a later date of the aux- 
iliary parts of speech, the prepositions, adverbs, 
and conjunctions, and (where they exist) the enclitics the 
and a; these last, however, (as separate words, 1 ) are wanting 
from a large number of languages. A third stage is the 
variation of certain words to form out of them other words 
which are nearly related in character to the first. We may 
speak of this process as a process of ringing the changes 
upon certain root-sounds to form a series of words allied in 
sound and allied in sense also. We have several instances 
of such groups of allied words in our own language. Fly, 
flee, flew, fled, are words allied in sound and in sense. In 
these cases the sound of the letters f-1 constitutes what we 
may call the root-sound. And it may be said at once that 
those languages are said to be related in each of which a 
certain number of words can be traced back to root-sounds 
which are common to the two or more tongues. 

In the case of the vast majority of words, before we can 
begin by comparing one word with another, or trying to 
discover the root-words of several different languages, we 
have first to trace the history of these words backwards, 
each in its own language, and find their most primitive 
forms. But in tongues which are pretty nearly related 
we have often no difficulty in seeing the similarity of corre- 
sponding words just as they stand to-day. We have no 
difficulty, for instance, in seeing the connection of the 
German Knecht and our knight? the German Nacht and 

1 See below, pp. 70-80. 

2 These two words have, it is true, quite changed their meanings ; 
but our knight rose to its honourable sense from having come to be 
used only for the servants or attendants of the king (in battle), while 
the German word retained its older sense of servant, groom, only. 



68 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

our night, the German Raum and our room ; or, again, the 
connection between the Italian padre and the French pere, 
the Italian tavola and the French (and English) table, etc. 

But where the connection between languages is more 
distant, we have more and more to go back to much simpler 
roots, in order to show the relationship between them ; and 
by a vast majority the primitive root-sounds in any large 
family of languages are single syllables, whereof the most 
constant parts are (as a rule) the consonants. So far as 
our knowledge goes, we might think of man as beginning 
human speech with a certain number of these simple root- 
sounds, and then proceeding to ring the changes upon 
these root-sounds to express varieties in the root-idea. 
Sometimes it is easy enough to trace the connection of 
ideas between different words which have been formed out 
of the same root-word. But sometimes this is not at all 
easy. Nor can we say why this special sound has been 
adopted for any one notion more than for a number of 
others to which it would have applied equally well. From 
a root, which in Sanskrit appears in its most ancient form, 
as md, 'to measure,' we get words in Greek and Latin 
which mean ' to think ; ' and from the same root comes our 
'man,' the person who measures, who compares, i.e., who 
thinks, also our moon, which means ' the measurer,' because 
the moon helps to measure out the time, the months. But 
how arbitrary seems this connection between man and 
moon ! So, too, our crab is from the word creep, and means 
the animal that creeps. But why this name should have 
been given to crab rather than to ant and beetle it is 
impossible to say. So that there appears as little trace of 
a reason governing the formation of words out of root- 
sounds as there appeared in the adoption of root-sounds to 
express certain fundamental ideas. 



ROOT-SOUNDS. 69 



Thus equipped with his fixed root and the various words 
formed out of it, man had the rough material out of which 
to build up all the elaborate languages which the world 
has known. And he continued his work something in this 
fashion. As generation followed generation the pronunci- 
ation of words was changed, as is constantly being done at 
the present day. Our grandmothers pronounced 'Rome,' 
1 Room,' and ' brooch/ as it was spelt, and not as we pro- 
nounce it — 'broach.' And let it be remembered, before 
writing was invented, there was nothing but the pronuncia- 
tion to fix the word, and a new pronunciation was really 
a new word. When there was no written form to petrify 
a word, these changes of pronunciation were very rapid and 
frequent, so that not only would each generation have a 
different set of words from their fathers, but probably each 
tribe would be partly unintelligible to its neighbouring 
tribes, just as a Somersetshire man is to a great extent 
unintelligible to a man from Yorkshire. The first result of 
these changes would be the springing up of that class of 
' meaningless ' words of which we spoke above. Out of 
some significant words, such as 'head' and 'foot,' would 
arise insignificant words similar to 'over' and 'under.' 
Such a change could only begin when of two names each 
for ' head ' and ' foot ' one became obsolete as a noun, and 
was only used adverbially. Then what had originally 
meant, metaphorically, 'head of rock' and 'foot of rock' 1 
might come to be used for ' over ' and ' under the rock,' in 
exactly the same way that the word ago, having changed 
its form from agone, has become a ' meaningless ' word to 
the Englishman of to-day. 

And with the acquisition of the insignificant words a 
new and very important process began. To understand 
1 See above, p. 66. 



70 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

what it was we will, as we did before, begin by examining 

the formation of some of the languages with which we 

are, probably, more or less familiar. Let us 

. T a w . ° note how very many more variations on the 
inflexions. J J 

same root are to be found in some lan- 
guages than in others. On the root die, which in Latin 
expresses the notion of speaking, we have the variations 
dico, dixi, dicere, dictum, dictio, dicto, dicor, dictor, dictator, 
dictatrix, etc. ; and yet this does not nearly exhaust the 
list, for we have all the changes in the different tenses of 
dico, dicto, dicor, etc., in the different cases of dictio, dictator, 
dictatrix, etc. The languages which contain these numerous 
variations upon one root are what are called the inflected 
languages, and the greater number of the changes which 
they make come under the head of what grammarians call 
inflexions. These inflexions are of no meaning in them 
selves, they have no existence even in themselves as words. 
And yet what is curious is that they are the same for a great 
number of different words ; and they express the same rela- 
tive meaning in the places where they stand whatever the 
word may be. If the -nis of dictionis expresses a certain 
idea relative to dictio, so does the -nis of lectionis express 
the same idea relative to lectio, the -nis of actionis the same 
idea relative to actio, and so forth. 

Or, to take an example from a modern inflected language, 
if the -es of Mannes, expresses a certain idea relative to 
Mann, so does the same inflexion (-es or -s) in Hauses, 
Baums, etc., relative to Haus and Banm. 

Now, how are we to explain this fact ? Our grammars, 
it is true, take it for granted, and give it us as a thing which 
requires no explanation — the genitive inflexion is -nis or 
-es, or whatever it may be. That is all they tell us. But 
we cannot be content to take anything of course. An 



GROWTH OF INFLEXIONS. 71 

explanation, however, is not difficult, and follows, almost of 
course, on the exercise of a little common sense. If the 
-es of Mannes, Hauses, Baumes (Baums) expresses the idea 
'of,' then, at one time or another, es, or some root from 
which it is derived, must have meant 'of.' This explains 
easily and naturally enough the inflexions in any inflected 
language. They have no meaning now, but at one time they 
(or their original forms — their ancestors, so to speak) had no 
doubt just as much meaning by themselves as our 'of.' 
And therefore the only difference between our use in 
England to-day, and the ancestral use in a primitive lan- 
guage, was that we say 'of [the] man,' and the ancestral 
language would have said 'man-of,' 'house-of,' etc. This 
accounts for the same genitive forms being used for so many 
different words. 

And that the same genitive forms are not used throughout 
any language is no real objection to this theory. If we say 
dictionis, lectionis, but musce, roses; if we say Mannes, Hauses, 
but Blume, Rose, the only reason of these varieties is that 
the languages from which these inflexions are derived pos- 
sessed more than one word meaning ' of,' and that one of 
these words was attached to a certain series of nouns, 
another word to another series. 

This is the explanation which mere common sense would 
give of the origin of inflexions in language, and further 
research, had we time to examine the history of language 
more elaborately, would show that it was fundamentally the 
right explanation. The only correction which we should 
have to make on this first arid crude theory is explained 
a little further on. Thus we see in this third stage of 
language a process very closely analogous to the second. 
The second stage gave us the auxiliary words, which have 
decayed so to say, out of the class of significant words. 



72 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

The third stage gives us the auxiliary words joined on to 
the significant ones, and in their turn decaying to become 
mere inflexions. 

I have called this growth of inflexions the third stage. 
It is the third great stage in the formation of language, 
and is the only other stage distinguishable when we are 
examining what is called an inflected language. And all 
the languages the general reader is likely to know belong 
to this class. But when we turn to a wider study of the 
various tongues in use among mankind we find that this 
process of forming inflexions is a very slow one, that it, in 
its turn, has gone through many stages. And it is, in fact, 
the different stages through which a language has passed 
on its road to the formation of inflexions which settles the 
class in which it is to be placed among the various tongues 
spoken by mankind. 

We shall soon understand what are these further stages 
in language-formation. As far as we have been able to 
see at present, the inflexion presents itself as something 
added on to the significant word to give it a varied mean- 
ing. It is evidently therefore part of a new process through 
which language has to go after it has completed its original 
stock of sounds, namely, the formation of fresh words by 
joining together two others which already exist. This is 
a process which, no doubt, in some shape or other, began 
in the very earliest ages, and which is to this day going on 
continually. The simpler form of it is the joining together 
two words which are significant when they stand alone to 
form a third word expressing a new idea ; just as we have 
joined 'ant' to 'hill' and formed ant-hill, which is a different 
idea than either ant or hill taken alone. In the words 
playful, joyful, again, we have the same process carried 
rather further. The words mean simply play-full, ' full of 



GROWTH OF INFLEXIONS. 73 

play,' joy-full, 'full of joy.' But we do not in reality quite 
think of this meaning when we use them. The termination 
ful has become half-meaningless by itself, and in doing so 
we observe it has slightly changed its original form. 

But far more important in the history of language is the 
joining of the meaningless or auxiliary words on to other 
words of the first, the significant class, whereby in the 
course of time the inflexions of language have been 
formed. Although we always put the meaningless quali- 
fying word before the chief word, and say ' on the rock,' 
or ' under the rock,' it is more natural to man, as is shown 
by all languages, to put the principal idea first, and say 
'rock on,' 'rock under,' the idea rock being of course 
the chief idea, the part of the rock, or position in relation 
to the rock, coming after. So the first step towards 
forming grammar was the getting a number of meaning- 
less words, and joining them on to the substantive, 'rock,' 
' rock-by,' ' rock-in,' ' rock-to,' etc. So with the verb. The 
essential idea in the verb is the action itself, the next idea 
is the time or person* in which the action takes place ; 
and the natural thing for man to do is to make the words 
follow that order. The joining process would give us from 
love, the idea of loving, 'love-I,' 'love-thou,' 'love-he,' etc.; 
and for the imperfect ' love-was-I,' ' love-was-thou,' 'love- 
was-he,' ' love-was-we,' ' love-was-ye,' ' love-was-they ; ' for 
perfect ' love-have-I,' ' love-have-thou,' 'love-have-he,' etc. 
Of course, these are merely illustrations, but they make the 
mode of this early joining process clearer than if we had 
chosen a language where that process is actually found in 
its purity, and then translated the forms into their English 
equivalents. 

We have now arrived at a stage in the formation of lan- 
guage where both meaning and meaningless words have been 



74 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

introduced, and where words have been made up out of 
combinations of the two. We see at once that with regard 
to meaningless words the use of them would naturally be 
fixed very much by tradition and custom; and whereas there 
might be a great many words standing for ant and hill, and 
therefore a great many ways of saying ant-hill, for the 
meaningless words, such as under and on, there would 
probably be only a few words. The reason of this is very 
plain. While all the separate synonyms for hill expressed 
different ways in which it struck the mind, either as being 
high, or large, or steep, or what not, for under and on, being 
meaningless words not producing any picture in the mind, 
only one word apiece or one or two words could very well 
be in use. So long as under and on were significant words, 
meaning, perhaps, as we imagined, head of, ox foot of, there 
would be plenty of synonyms for them ; but only one or 
two out of all these would be handed down in their mean- 
ingless forms. And it is this very fact which, as we have seen, 
accounts for all the grammars of ail languages, every one of 
those grammatical terminations which we know so well in 
Latin and Greek, and German, having been originally nothing 
else than meaningless words added on to modify the words 
which still retained their meaning. We saw before that it 
was much more natural for people to say 'rock-on' or 
« hand-in ' than ' on the rock ' or ' in the hand ' — because 
rock and hand were the most important ideas and came 
first into the mind, while on, in, etc., were only subsidiary 
ideas depending upon the important ones. If we stop at 
rock or hand without adding on and in, we have still got 
something definite upon which our thoughts can rest, but 
we could not possibly stop at on and in alone, and have 
any idea in our minds at all. It is plain enough therefore 
that, though we say ' on the rock,' we must have the idea 



GROWTH OF INFLEXIONS. 75 

of all the three words in our mind before we begin the 
phrase, and therefore that our words do not follow the 
natural order of our ideas ; whereas rock-on, hand-in, show 
the ideas just in the way they come into the mind. 

It is a fact, then, that all case-endings arose from adding 
on meaningless words to the end of the word, the noun or 
pronoun — Mann, des mann-es, dem Mann-e ; kom-o, hom-inis, 
hom-ini: the addition to the root in every case was once a 
distinct word of the auxiliary kind, or derived from such a 
word. The meanings of case-endings such as these cannot, it 
is true, be discovered now, for they came into existence long 
before such languages as German or Latin were spoken, and 
their meanings were lost sight of in ages which passed 
before history. But that time when the terminations which 
are meaningless now had a meaning, and the period of 
transition between this state and the state of a language 
which is full of grammatical changes inexplicable to those 
who use them, form distinct epochs in the history of every 
language. And it is just the same with verb-endings as 
with the case endings — ich bin, du bist, really express the ' I ' 
and ' thou ' twice over, as the pronouns exist though hidden 
and lost sight of in the -n and -st of the verb. In the case 
of verbs, indeed, we may without going far give some idea 
of how these endings can be detected. We may say at 
once that Sanskrit, Persian, Armenian, Greek, Latin, French, 
Italian, Spanish, German, English, Norse, Gaelic, Welsh, 
Lithuanian, Russian, and other Slavonic languages are all 
connected together in various degrees of relationship, all 
descended from one common ancestor, some being close 
cousins, and some very distant. Now in Sanskrit ' I am ' is 
thus declined : — 

as -mi I am. '-smas we are. 

a-si thou art. , s-tha ye are. 

as-ti he is. 's-anti they are. 



76 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

By separating the root from the ending in this way we may 
the more easily detect the additions to the root, and their 
meanings. As is the root expressing the idea of being, 
existing ; mi is from a root meaning I (preserved in me, 
Greek and Lat. me, moi, m\ich\ etc.) ; so we get as-mi, am-I, 
or I am. Then we may trace this form of word through a 
number of languages connected with the Sanskrit. The most 
important part of as-mi, the consonants, are preserved in the 
Latin sum, I am, from which, by some further changes come 
the French suis, the Italian sono : the same word appears in 
our a-m, and in the Greek eimi (Doric esmi), I am. Next, 
coming to the second word, we see one of the s's cut out, 
and we get a-si, in which the a is the root, and the si the 
addition signifying thou. To this addition correspond the 
final s's in the Latin es, French es — tu es, and the Greek eis 
(Doric essi). So, again, in as-ti, the ti expresses he, and this 
corresponds to the Latin est, French est, the Greek esti, the 
German ist ; in the English the expressive / has been lost. 
We will not continue the comparison of each word ; it will 
be sufficient if we place side by side the same tense in 
Sanskrit and in Latin, 1 and give those who do not know 
Latin an opportunity of recognizing for themselves the tense 
in its changed form in French or Italian : — 



English. 


Sanskrit. 


Latin. 


I am 


as-mi 


sum. 


thou art 


a-si 


es. 


he is 


as-ti 


est. 


we are 


's-mas 


sumus. 


ye are 


's-tha 


estis. 


they are 


's-anti 


sunt. 



The plural of the added portion we see contains the letters 
m-s, and if we split these up again we get the separate roots 

1 The reader who does not know Latin may easily recognize the 
kindred forms in French, Italian, Spanish, etc. 



GROWTH OF INFLEXIONS. 77 

mi and si, so that mas means most literally ' I,' and ' thou,' 
and hence ' we.' In the second person the Latin has pre- 
served an older form than the Sanskrit, s-t the proper root- 
consonants for the addition part of the second person plural, 
combining the ideas thou and he, from which, ye. The 
third person plural cannot be so easily explained. 

It will be seen that in the English almost all likeness to 
the Sanskrit terminations has been lost. Our verb 'to be ' 
is very irregular, being, in fact, a mixture of several distinct 
verbs. The Anglo-Saxon had the verb bed contracted from 
beom (here we have at least the m- ending for I), I am, byst, 
thou art, bydh, he is, and the same appear in the German 
bin, bist It is, of course, very difficult to trace the remains 
of the meaningless additions in such advanced languages as 
ours, or even in such as Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. Never- 
theless, the reader may find it not uninteresting to trace in 
the Latin through most of the tenses of verbs these endings 
— m, for I, the first person \ s, for thou, the second person ; 
t, for he, the third person ; m-s f for I and thou, we ; st, for 
ye, thou and he, ye ; nt, for they. And the same reader 
must be content to take on trust the fact that other additions 
corresponding to different tenses can also be shown or 
reasonably guessed to have been words expressive by them- 
selves of the idea which belongs to the particular tense ; so 
that where we have such a tense as — 

amabam I was loving, 

amabas thou wast loving, 

amabat, etc. he was loving, 

we may recognize the meaning of the component parts 
thus : — 

ama-ba-m love-was-I. 

ama-ba-s love-was-thou 

ama-ba-t love-was-he. 



7% THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

Of course, really to show the way in which these mean- 
ingless additions have been made and come to be amalga- 
mated with the root, we should have to take examples from 
a great number of languages in different stages of develop- 
ment. But we have thought it easier, for mere explanation, 
to take only such languages as were likely to be familiar to 
the reader, and even to supplement these examples with 
imaginary ones — like ' rock-on,' ' love-was-I,' etc. — in Eng- 
lish. For our object has been at first merely to give an 
intelligible account of how language has been formed, of the 
different stages it has passed through, and to leave to a 
future time the question as to which languages of the globe 
have passed through all these stages, and which have gone 
part of their way in the formation of a perfect language. 
Between the state of a language in which the meaning of 
all the separate parts of a word are recognized and that 
state where they are entirely lost, there is an immense gap, 
that indeed which separates the most from the least 
advanced languages of the world. 

Every language that is now spoken on the globe has gone 

through the stage of forming meaningless words, and is 

therefore possessed of words of both classes. 
Monosyllabic Th nQ 1q t head . f_ rock i or <f oot _ 

language. 

of-rock,' but ' rock-on ' and ' rock-under.' But 

there are still known languages in which almost every 
syllable is a word, and where grammar properly speaking is 
scarcely needed. For grammar, if we come to consider it 
exactly, is the explanation of the meaning of those added 
syllables or letters which have lost all natural meaning of 
their own. If each part of the word were as clear and as 
intelligible as ' rock-on " we should have no need of a 
grammar at all. A language of this sort is called a mono- 
syllabic or a radical language, not because the people only 



INFLECTED LANGUAGE. 79 

speak in monosyllables, but because each word, however 
compound, can be split up into monosyllables or roots, which 
have a distinctly recognizable meaning. ' Ant-hill-on ' or 
' love-was-I,' are like the words of such a language. 

The next stage of growth is where the meaning of the 
added parts has been lost sight of, except when it is con- 
nected with the word which it modifies ; but where the 

essential word has a distinct idea by itself, and 

• i 1 1 ■, ,-.•• o. r Agglutinative 

without the help of any addition. Suppose, for languacye> 

instance, through ages of change the 'was I' 

in our imaginary example got corrupted into ' wasi,' where 

wasi had no meaning by itself, but was used to express the 

first person of the past tense. The first person past of love 

would be 'love-wasi,' of move 'move-wasi,' and so on, 

1 wasi ' no longer having a meaning by itself, but ' love ' and 

1 move ' by themselves being perfectly understandable. Or, 

to take an actual declension from a Turanian language, — 

hakar-im I regard, bakar-iz we regard, 

bakar-sin thou regardest, bakar-siniz you regard, 

bakar he regards,* bakar-lar they regard, 

where, as we see, the root remains entirely unaffected by the 
addition of the personal pronoun. 

A language in this stage is said to be in the agglutinative 
stage, 1 because certain grammatical endings (like 'wasi') 
are merely as it were glued on to a root to change its mean- 
ing, while the root itself remains quite unaffected, and means 
neither less nor more than it did before. 

But, as ages pass on, the root and the addition get so 

closely combined that neither of them alone has, 

,'•,.. . , , , Inflected 

as a rule, a distinct meaning, and the language i angua g e . 

arrives at its third stage of grammar-formation. 
It is not difficult to find examples of a language in this con- 
1 Mr. Max Midler calls it the terminational stage. 



80 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

dition, for such is the case with all the languages by which 
we are surrounded. All the tongues which the majority of us 
are likely to study, almost all those which have any literature 
at all, have arrived at this last stage, which is called the in- 
flexional. For instance, though we might divide actionis into 
two parts actio and nis, and say that the former contains 
the essential idea, and the addition the idea implied by the 
genitive case, there are only a few Latin words with which 
such a process is possible, and even in the case of actio 
the separation is somewhat misleading. In homo the real 
root is horn, and the genitive is not homo-nis but hominis. 
So, again, though we were able to separate ' asmi ' into two 
parts — ' as ' and ' mi ' — one expressing the idea of being, the 
other the person ' I,' this distinction is the refinement of 
the grammarian, and would never have been recognized by 
an ordinary speaker of Sanskrit, for whom ' asmi ' simply 
meant ' I am,' without distinction of parts. In our ' am ' 
the grammarian recognizes that the ' a ' expresses existence, 
and the ' m ' expresses I ; but so completely have we lost 
sight of this, that we repeat the ' I ' before the verb. Just 
the same in Latin. No Roman could have recognized in 
the * s ' of sum ' am ' and in the ' m ' ' I ; ' for him sum 
meant simply and purely ' I am.' It was no more separ- 
able in his eyes than the French ites (Latin estis) in vous 
etes is separable into a root ' es,' contracted in the French 
into ' e,' meaning are, and an addition ' tes ' signifying you. 
This, then, is the last stage upon which language enters. 
It is called the inflexional or inflected stage, because the 
different grammatical changes are not now denoted by a 
mere addition to an intelligible word, but by a change in the 
word itself. The root may in many cases remain and be recog- 
nizable in its purity, but very frequently it is unrecognizable, 
so that the different case- or tense-endings can no longer be 



FIVE STAGES IN FORMATION OF LANGUAGE. 81 

looked upon as additions, but as changes. Take almost 
any Latin substantive, and we see this : homo, a man, the 
genitive is formed by changing homo into hominis, or, if we 
please, adding something to the root ho?n — which has in 
itself no meaning ; musa changes into musce ; and so forth. 

And now to recapitulate. We have in tracing the growth 
of language discovered first of all two stages whereby the 
material of the language was formed : the class The fiv 
of what we have called the meaning or signi- stages in the 
ficant words came into being, and out of this formation of 
was formed the second class of so-called mean- lan § ua S e - 
ingless or auxiliary words. These two stages were in the 
main passed through before any known language came into 
existence ; for there is no known language which does not 
contain words of both these classes ; albeit the second stage 
is likewise a process which is still going on, as in the 
examples chosen, where even and just pass from being adjec- 
tives into even and just the adverbs, and the French sub- 
stantives/^ and point take a like change of meaning. 

These first two stages passed, there follow three other 
stages which go to the formation of the grammar of a 
language : first the stage of merely coupling words together, 
so as to form fresh words — the monosyllabic state ; then the 
stage in which one part of the additional word has lost its 
meaning while the root-word remains unchanged — the stage 
called the agglutinative condition of language ; and, finally 
the stage in which the added portion has become to some 
extent absorbed into the root-word — which last stage is the 
inflected condition of a language. 

When we have come to this inflexional state, the history 
of the growth of language comes to an end. It happens 
indeed, sometimes, that a language which has arrived at 

G 



82 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

the inflected stage may in time come to drop nearly all its 
inflexions. This has been the case with English and French. 
Both are descended from languages which had elaborate 
grammars — the Saxon and the Latin ; but both, through an 
admixture with foreign tongues and from other causes, 
have come to drop almost all their grammatical forms. We 
show our grammar only in a few changes in our ordinary 
verbs — the second and third persons singular, thou goest, he 
goes ; the past tense and the past participle, use } used; buy, 
bought, etc. ; in further variations in our auxiliary verb 
'to be ; ' by changes in our pronouns, /, me, ye, you, who, 
whom, etc. ; and by the ' 's ' and ' s ' of the possessive 
case and of the plural, and the comparison of adjectives. 
The French preserve their grammar to some extent in their 
pronouns, their adjectives, the plurals of their nouns, and in 
their verbs. Instances such as these are cases of decay, 
and do not find any place in the history of the growth of 
language. 

We now pass on to examine where the growth of language 
has been fully achieved, where it has remained only stunted 
and imperfect. 



CHAPTER IV. 

FAMILIES OF LANGUAGE. 

We have now traced the different stages through which 
language may pass in attaining to its most perfect form, the 
inflected stage. There were the two stages in which what 
we may call the bones of the language were formed, the 
acquisition of those words which, like pen, ink and paper, 
when standing alone bring a definite idea into the mind, 
and, next, the acquisition of those other words which, like 
to, for, and, produce no idea in the mind when taken alone. 
We saw that while the first class of words may have been 
acquired with any imaginable rapidity, the second class 
could only have gradually come into use as one by one 
they fell out of the rank of the ' significant ' class. 

Again, after this skeleton of language has been got 
together, there were, we saw, three other stages which went 
to make up the grammar of a language : the radical stage, 
in which all the words of the language can be cut up into 
roots which are generally monosyllables, each of which has 
a meaning as a separate word ; the agglutinative stage, when 
the root, i.e. the part of the word which expresses the essen- 
tial idea, remains always distinct from any added portion; 
and, thirdly, the inflected stage, when in many cases the 



84 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

root and the addition to the root have become so interwoven 
as to be no longer distinguishable. 

Of course, really to understand what these three condi- 
tions are like, the reader would have to be acquainted with 
some language in each of the three ; but it is sufficient if 
we get clearly into our heads that there are these stages of 
language-growth, and that, further, each one of all the 
languages of the world may be said to be in one of the 
three. Our opportunities of tracing the history of languages 
being so limited, we have no recorded instance of a lan- 
guage passing out of one stage into another ; but when we 
examine into these states they so clearly wear the appear- 
ance of stages that there seems every reason to believe that 
a monosyllabic language might in time develop into an 
agglutinative, and again from that stage into an inflexional, 
language, if nothing stopped its growth. 

But what, we may ask, are the causes which put a stop 
to the free growth and development of language ? One of 
Arrest in the these causes is the invention of writing. Lan- 

growth of guage itself is of course spoken language, 

language, gp^d^ an( j as suc h is subject to no laws save 
those which belong to our organs of speaking and hearing. 
No sooner is the word spoken than it is gone, and lives 
only in the memory ; and thus speech, though it may last 
for centuries, dies, as it were, and comes to life again every 
hour. It is with language as it is with those national songs 
and ballads which, among nations that have no writing, take 
the place of books and histories. The same poem or the 
same tale passes from mouth to mouth almost unchanged 
for hundreds of years, and yet at no moment is it visible 
and tangible, nor for the most part of the time audible 
even, but for these centuries lives on in men's memories 
only. So Homer's ballads must have passed for several 



ARREST IN THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE. 85 

hundred years from mouth to mouth; and, stranger still, 
stories which were first told somewhere by the banks of the 
Oxus or the Jaxartes by distant ancestors of ours, are told 
to this very day, little altered, by peasants in remote districts 
of England and Scotland. But to return to language. It 
is very clear that so long as language remains speech and 
speech only, it is subject to just so many variations as, in 
the course of a generation or two, men may have introduced 
into their habits of speaking. Why these variations arise it 
is perhaps not quite easy to understand; but every one 
knows that they do arise, that from age to age, from 
generation to generation, not only are new words being 
continually introduced, and others which once served well 
enough dropped out of use, but constant changes are going 
on in the pronunciation of words. As we have already 
said, if left to itself a language would not remain quite the 
same in two different districts. We know, for instance, that 
the language of common people does differ very much in 
different counties, so that what with varieties of pronuncia- 
tion, and what with the 'use of really peculiar words, the 
inhabitants of one county are scarcely intelligible to the 
inhabitants of another. 

This constant change in language can be resolved, so to 
say, into two forces — one of decay, the other of renewal. 
The change which each word undergoes is of the nature of 
decay. It loses something from its original form. But 
then, out of this change, it passes into new forms ; and very 
often out of one word, by this mere process of change in 
sound, two words spring. We have already seen instances 
of how this may come about. The Anglo-Saxon agan be- 
comes in process of time agone, as we have seen. That 
word again, by a further process of decay, changes into ago. 
So far we have nothing but loss. But then the Old English 



86 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

agdn had only the same meaning as our past participle gone. 1 
So now we have two words really in the place of one, and 
where formerly men would have said, ' It is a long time 
agone,' or ' That man has lately agone,' we now can say, ' It 
is a long time ago,' 'The man has lately gone. 7 And we 
may in any language watch this process of decay {phonetic 
decay, as it is called) and regeneration {dialectic regeneration, 
the philologists call it) ever going forward. We see, as it 

were, — 

' The hungry ocean gain 
Advantage o'er the kingdom of the shore ; 

And the firm soil win of the watery main 
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store.' 

The influence which keeps a language together, and tends 
to make changes such as these as few as possible, is that of 
writing. When once writing has been invented it is clear 
that language no longer depends upon the memory only, 
no longer has such a seemingly precarious tenure of life as 
it had when it was no more than speech. The writing 
remains a strong bulwark against the changes of time. 
Although our written words are but the symbols of sound, 
they are symbols so clear that the recollection of the sound 
springs up in our minds the moment the written word 
comes before our eyes. So it is that there are hundreds of 
words in the English language which we should many 
of us not use once in a lifetime, which are yet perfectly 
familiar to us. All old-fashioned words which belong to 
the literary language, and are never used now in common 
life, would have been forgotten long ago except for writing. 
The fact, again, that those provincialisms which make the 
peasants of different counties almost mutually unintelligible 
do not affect the intercourse of educated people, is owing 
to the existence of a written language. 

1 Agone is possibly from a stronger form dqan, 'to pass away.' 



CHINESE. 87 



It was at one time thought by philologists that in 
Chinese we had a genuine specimen of a language in the 
radical stage of formation. As such it is cited, 
for instance, in Professor Max Miiller's Lec- 
tures on the Science of Language. But the most trustworthy 
Chinese scholars are, I believe, now of opinion that the 
earliest Chinese of which we can find any trace had already 
passed through this stage and become an agglutinative 
language, and that it has since decayed somewhat from 
that condition to become once more almost a monosyllabic 
language. 

However that may be, it is acknowledged that Chinese 
has never passed beyond a very primitive condition, and 
that its having rested so long in this state is due more than 
anything else to the early invention of writing in that 
country. We know how strange has been the whole history 
of civilization in China. How the Chinese, after they had 
made long ago an advance far beyond all their contempo- 
raries at that date of the world's history, seem to have 
suddenly stopped short tfrere, and have remained ever since 
a stunted incomplete race, devoid of greatness in any form. 
Their character is reflected very accurately in their lan- 
guage. While it was still in a very primitive condition 
writing was introduced into the country, and from that time 
forward the tongue remained almost unchanged. Other 
languages which are closely allied to Chinese — Burmese, 
Siamese, and Thibetan — are so nearly monosyllabic that they 
can scarcely be considered to have yet got fairly into the 
agglutinative stage. 

It is, then, writing which has preserved for us Chinese in 
the very primitive condition in which we find it. For people 
in a lower order of civilization there may be many other 
causes at work to prevent an agglutinative language 



88 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

becoming inflexional. It is not always easy to say what the 
hindering causes have been in any individual case ; but per- 
haps, if we look at the difference between the last 
, two classes of language, we can get some idea of 

what they might be for the class of agglutinative 
languages as a whole. An inflexional language has quite 
lost the memory of the real meaning of its inflexions — or 
at least the real reason of them. We could give no reason 
why we should not use bought in the place of buy, art in the 
place of am, ivhom in the place of who — no other reason 
save that we have always been taught to use the words in 
the position they take in our speech. But there was once 
a time when the changes only existed in the form of addi- 
tions having a distinct meaning. Even in agglutinative 
languages these additions have a distinct meaning as ad- 
ditions, or, in other words, if we were using an agglutina- 
tive language we should be always able to distinguish the 
addition from the root, and so should understand the pre- 
cise effect of the former in modifying the latter. To 
understand the use of words in an agglutinative language, 
therefore, a great deal less of tradition and memory would 
be required than are wanted to preserve an inflected 
language. This really is the same as saying that for the 
inflected language we must have a much more constant use ; 
and this again implies a greater intellectual life, a closer 
bond of union among the people who speak it, than exists 
among those who speak agglutinative languages. 

Or if we look at the change from another point of view, 
we can say that the cause of the mixing up of the root, 
and its addition came at first from a desire to shorten 
the word and to save time — a desire which was natural 
to people who spoke much and had much intercourse. 
We may then, from these various considerations, conclude 



TURANIAN LANGUAGES. 89 



that the people who use the agglutinative languages are 
people who have not what is called a close and active 
national life. This is exactly what we find to be the case. 
If a primitive language, such as the Chinese, belongs to a 
people who have, as it were, developed too quickly, the 
agglutinative languages, as a class, distinguish a vast section 
of the human race whose natural condition is a very un- 
formed one, who are for the most part nomadic races 
without fixed homes, or laws, or states. They live a tribal 
existence, each man having little intercourse save with 
those of his immediate neighbourhood. They are unused 
to public assemblies. Such assemblies take among early 
peoples almost the place of literature, in obliging men to 
have a common language and a united national life. 
Being without these controlling influences, it results that 
the different dialects and tongues belonging to the aggluti- 
native class are almost endless. It is not our intention to 
weary the reader by even a bare list of them. But we 
may glance at the chief heads into which these multifarious 
languages may be grouped, and the geographical position 
of those who speak them. 

The agglutinative tongues include the speech of all those 
peoples of Central Asia whom in common language we 
are wont to speak of as Tartars, but whom it would be 
more correct to describe as belonging to the Turkic or 
Mongol class, and of whom several different branches — 
the Huns, who emigrated from the borders of China to 
Europe ; the Mongols or Moghuls, who conquered Persia 
and Hindustan ; and lastly, the Osmanlis, or Ottomans, 
who invaded Europe and founded the Turkish Empire 
— are the most famous, and most infamous, in history. 
Another large class of agglutinative languages belongs to 
the natives of the vast region of Siberia, from the Ural 



9 o THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

mountains to the far east. x\nother great class, closely 
allied to these last, the Finnish tongues namely, once 
spread across all the northern half of what is now European 
Russia, and across North Scandinavia ; but the people who 
spoke them have been gradually driven to the extreme north 
by the Russians and Scandinavians. Lastly, a third division 
is formed by those languages which belonged to the original 
inhabitants of Hindustan before the greater part of the 
country was occupied by the Hindus. These languages are 
spoken of as the Dravidian class. The natural condition 
of these various nations or peoples is, as we have said, 
a nomadic state, a state in which agriculture is scarcely 
known, though individual nations out of them have risen 
to considerable civilization. And as in very early times 
ancestors of ours who belonged to a race speaking an 
inflexional language bestowed upon some part of these 
nomadic people the appellation Tura, which means ' the 
swiftness of a horse,' from their constantly moving from 
place to place, the word Turanian has been applied to all 
these various peoples, and the agglutinative languages are 
spoken of generally as Turanian tongues. 

And now we come to the last — the most important body 
of languages — the inflected; and we see that for it have 

Aryan and ^ een ^ a ^ tne more important nations and 
Semitic languages of the world. Almost all the 'his- 

languages. toric ' people, living or dead, almost all the 
more civilized among nations, come under this our last 
division : the ancient Egyptians, Chaldaeans, Assyrians, 
Persians, Greeks, and Romans, as well as the modern 
Hindus and the native Persians, and almost all the inhabi- 
tants of Europe, with the countless colonies which these last 
have spread over the surface of the globe. The class of 
inflected languages is separated into two main divisions or 



KINSHIP IN LANGUAGES. 91 

families, within each of which the languages are held by a 
tie of relationship. Just as people are of the same family 
when they recognize their descent from a common ances- 
tor, so languages belong to one family when they can show 
clear signs that they have grown out of one parent tongue. 
We may be sure that we are all the children of the first 
pair, and we may know in the same way that all languages 
must have grown and changed out of the first speech. But 
the traces of parentage and relationship are in both cases 
buried in oblivion ; it is only when we come much farther 
down in the history of the world that we can really see the 
marks of distinct kinship in the tongues of nations separated 
by thousands of miles, different in colour, in habits, in civili- 
zation, and quite unconscious of any common fatherhood. 

Now as to the way in which this kinship among languages 
may be detected. Among some languages there is such a 
close relationship that even an unskilled eye 
can discover it When we see, for instance, \™^^ 
such likenesses as exist in English and Ger- 
man between the very , commonest words of life — kann 
and can, soil and shall, muss and mush ist and is, gut 
and good, hart and hard, mann and man, fur and for, 
together with an innumerable number of verbs, adjectives, 
substantives, prepositions, etc., which differ but slightly one 
from another — we may feel sure either that the English once 
spoke German, that the Germans once spoke English, or 
that English and German have both become a little altered 
from a lost language which was spoken by the ancestors of 
the present inhabitants of England and Deutsch-land. As 
a matter of fact the last is the case. English and German 
are brother languages, neither is the parent of the other. 
Now having our attention once called to this relationship, 
we might, any of us who know English and German, at 



92 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

once set about making a long list of words which are com- 
mon to the two languages ; and it would not be a bad 
amusement for any reader just to turn over the leaves of a 
dictionary and note how many German words (especially 
of the common sort) they find that have a corresponding 
word in English. The first thing we begin to see is the fact 
that the consonants form, as it were, the bones of a word, 
and that changes of a vowel are, as a rule, comparatively 
unimportant provided these remain unaltered. The next 
thing we see is that even the consonants do not generally 
remain the same, but that in place of one such letter in one 
language, another of a sound very like it appears in the 
other language. 

For instance, we soon begin to notice that * t ' in German 
is often represented by ' d ' in English, as tag becomes day ; 
tochter, daughter-, breit, broad; traum, dream; reiten, ride; 
but sometimes by 'th ' in English, as vater becomes father ; 
??iutter, mother. Again, ' d ' in German is often equal to 
'TH'in English, as dorf thorpe ; feder, feather ; dreschen, 
thrash (thresh) ; drangen, throng ; der (die), the ; das, that. 
Now there is a certain likeness common to these three sounds, 
' t,' ' d,' and 'th,' as any one's ear will tell him if he say te, 
de, the. As a matter of fact they are all pronounced with 
the tongue pressed against the teeth, only in rather different 
places ; and in the case of the last sound, the, 1 with a breath 
or aspirate sent between the teeth at the same time. So 
we see that, these letters being really so much alike in 
sound, there is nothing at all extraordinary in one sound 
becoming exchanged for another in the two languages. We 
learn, therefore, to look beyond the mere appearance of the 

1 To get the full sound of the th, this should be said not as we 
pronounce our article the (which really has the sound dhe), but like the 
first part of Thebes, theme, etc. 



KINSHIP IN LANGUAGES. 93 

word, to weigh, so to speak, the sounds against each other, 
and to detect likenesses which might perhaps otherwise 
have escaped us. For instance, if we see that ch in German 
is often represented by gh in English — in such words as 
tochter, daughter ; knecht, knight; mochte, might ; lachen, 
laugh, — we have no difficulty in now seeing how exactly 
durch corresponds to our through. For we have at the 
beginning the d which naturally corresponds to our t, the r 
remains unchanged, and the ch naturally corresponds to our 
gh ; only the vowel is different in position, and that is of 
comparatively small account Nevertheless at first sight we 
should by no means have been inclined to allow the near 
relationship of durch and through. Thus our power of 
comparison continually increases, albeit a knowledge of 
several languages is necessary before we can establish satis- 
factory rules or proceed with at all sure steps. 

When we have acquired this knowledge there are few 
things more interesting than noting the changes which words 
undergo in the different tongues, and learning how to detect 
the same words under .various disguises. And when we 
have begun to do this, it is by comparing the words of 
our own language with corresponding words in the allied 
tongues German, Norse, or Dutch, whatever it may be, that 
we are most frequently reminded of the meaning of words 
which have half grown out of use with us. As, for instance, 
when the German Leiche (corpse) reminds us of the mean- 
ing of lich-gate (A.S. lica, a corpse) and Lichfield; or 
the Norse moos, a marshy or heathy region, explains our 
#ztf.w-troopers. I doubt if most people quite know what 
sea-mews are, still more if the word mewstone (which, for 
example, is the name of a rock near Plymouth) would at 
once call up the right idea into their mind. But the Ger- 
man Mowe, sea-gull, makes it all plain. How curious is the 



94 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

relationship between earth and hearth, which is exactly repro- 
duced in the German Erde and Herde ! or the obsolete 
use of the word tide for ' time ' (the original meaning of the 
tides — the 'times,') in the expression ' Time and tide wait for 
no man ' ! But in the Norse we have the same expression 
Tid og Time, which signifies exactly Macbeth's ' time and 
the hour.' And of course these words, our tide, Norse Tid, 
are the correspondants of the German zeit. When once 
we have detected how often the German z corresponds to 
the English / — as in Zahn, tooth ; Zehe, toe ; Zahlen, to tell 
(i.e., to count) ; Zinn, tin — we have no difficulty in seeing 
that our town may correspond to the German Zaun, a 
hedge : and we guess, what is in fact the case, that the 
original meaning of town was only an enclosed or empaled 
place. The relationship of our fee to the German Vieh, 
cattle, and the proof that the earliest money with us was 
cattle-money, would, at first sight, be perhaps not so easily 
surmised by a mere comparison of German and English 
words. These are only one or two of the ten thousand 
points of interest which rise up before us almost immediately 
after we have, so to say, stepped outside the walls of our 
own language into the domains of its very nearest relations. 
Nor is the interest of this kind of comparison less 
great very often in the case of proper names. The smaller 
family — or, as we have used the word family to express 
a large class of languages, let us say the branch to 
which English and German belong — is called the Teutonic 
branch. To that branch belonged nearly all those barbarian 
nations who, towards the fall of the Roman empire, began 
the invasion of her territories, and ended by carving out of 
them most of the various states and kingdoms of modern 
Europe. The best test we have of the nationalities of 
these peoples, the best proof that they were connected by 



KINSHIP IN LANGUAGES. 95 

language with each other and with the modern Teutonic 
nations, is to be found in their proper names. We have, 
for instance, among the Vandals such names as Hilderic, 
Genseric, and the like ; we compare them at once with 
Theodoric and Alaric, which were names of famous Goths. 
Then as the Gothic language has been preserved we recog- 
nize the termination rik or riks in Gothic, meaning a 
' king,' and connected with the German retch, and also with 
the Latin rex — Alaric becomes al-rik, 'all-king,' universal 
king. In Theodoric we recognize the Gothic thiudarik, 
'king of the people.' Again, this Gothic word thiuda is 
really the same as the German deutsch, or as 'Dutch,' and is 
the word of which ' Teutonic ' is only a Latinized form. In 
the same way Hilda-rik in Gothic is ' king of battles ; ' and 
having got this word from the Vandals we have not much 
difficulty in recognizing Childeric, the usually written form 
of the name of a Frankish king, as the same word. This 
change teaches us to turn ' ch ' of Frankish names in our 
history-books into ' h,' so that instead of Chlovis (which 
should be Chlodoveus) 'we first get Hlovis, which is only 
a softened form of Hlodovig, or Hludwig, the modern 
Ludwig, our Louis. Hlud is known to have meant ' famous ' * 
and wig a ' warrior,' so that Ludwig means famous warrior. 
The same word ' wig ' seems to appear in the word Mero- 
vingian, a Latinized form of Meer-wig, 2 which would mean 
sea-warrior. 

These instances show us the kind of results we obtain by a 
comparison of languages. In the case of these names, for 
instance, we have got enough to show a very close relation- 
ship amongst the Vandals, the Goths, and the Franks ; and 
had we time many more instances might have been chosen 

1 Cf. the Greek klutos. 

* Stephen, Lectures on the History of France, 



96 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

to support this conclusion. Here, of course, we have been 
confining ourselves to one small branch of a large family. 
The road, the farther we go, is beset with greater difficulties 
and dangers of mistake, and the student can do little unless 
he is guided by fixed rules, which we should have to follow, 
supposing we were able to carry on our inquiries into many 
and distant languages. We may, to some extent, judge for 
ourselves what some of these guiding rules must be. 

Those words which we have instanced as being common 
to English and German, both we and the Germans have got 
by inheritance from an earlier language. Yet there are in 
English hundreds of words which are not acquired by 
inheritance from other languages, but merely by adoption ; 
hundreds of words have been taken directly from the 
Latin, or from the Latin through the French, or from 
the Greek, and not derived from any early language which 
was the parent of the Latin, Greek, and English. How 
shall we distinguish between these classes of words ? We 
answer, in the first place, that the simpler words are almost 
sure to be inherited, because people, in however rude a 
state they were, could never have done without words to 
express such everyday ideas as to have, to be, to laugh, to 
make, to kill — 7, thou, to, for, and ; whereas they might 
have done well enough without words such as government, 
literature, sensation, expression, words which express either 
things which were quite out of the way of these primitive 
people, or commonish ideas in a somewhat grand and 
abstract form. 

One of our rules, therefore, must be to begin by choosing 
the commoner class of words, or, generally speaking, those 
words which are pretty sure never to have fallen out of use, 
and which therefore must have been handed down from 
father to son. 



THE SEMITIC RACES. 97 

There is another rule — that those languages must be classed 
together which have like grammatical forms, This is the 
rule of especial importance in distinguishing a complete 
family of languages. For when once a language has got 
into the inflected stage, though it may hereafter lose or 
greatly modify nearly all its inflexions, it never either sinks 
back into the agglutinative stage, or adopts the grammatical 
forms of another language which is also in the inflected 
condition. 

These are the general rules, therefore, upon which we go. 
We look first for the grammatical forms and then for the 
simple roots, and according to the resemblance or want of 
resemblance between them we decide whether two tongues 
have any relationship, and whether that relationship is near 
or distant. 

Now it has in this way been found out that all inflected 

languages belong to one of two families, called the Semitic 

and the Aryan. Let us begin with the Semitic. 

This word, which is only a Latinized way of The Semitlc 

_,.... , . . races, 

saying Shemite, is given to the nations who are 

supposed to be descended from Shem, the second son 01 

Noah. The nations who have spoken languages belonging 

to this Semitic family have been those who appear so much 

in Old Testament history, and who played a mighty part 

in the world while our own ancestors were still wandering 

tribes, and at an age when darkness still obscured the 

doings of the Greeks and Romans. Foremost among all 

in point of age and fame stand the Egyptians, who are 

believed to have migrated in far pre-historic ages to the 

land in which they rose to fame. They found there a 

people of a lower, a negro or half-negro race, and mingled 

with them, so that their language ceased to be a pure 

H 



98 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

Semitic tongue. In its foundation, however, it was Semitic. 

The earliest of the recorded kings of Egypt, Menes, 

is believed to date back as far as 5000 B.C. Next in 

antiquity come the Chaldaeans, who have left behind them 

great monuments in the ancient cities Erech and Ur, and 

their successors the Assyrians and Babylonians. Abraham, 

himself, we know, was a Chaldsean, and from him descended 

the Hebrew nation, who were destined to shed the highest 

honour on the Semitic race. Yet, so great may be the 

degeneration of some races and the rise of others, so great 

may be the divisions which thus spring up between peoples 

who were once akin, it is also true that all those peoples 

whom the Children of Israel were specially commanded 

to fight against and even to exterminate — the Canaanites, 

the Moabites, and the Edomites — were likewise of Semitic 

family. The Phoenicians are another race from the same 

stock who have made their mark in the world. We know 

how, coming first from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, they 

led the way in the art of navigation, sent colonies to various 

parts of the world, and foremost among these founded 

Carthage, the rival and almost the destroyer of Rome. 

Our list of celebrated Semitic races must close with the 

Arabs, the founders of Mohammedanism, the conquerors 

at whose name all Europe used to tremble, whose kingdoms 

once extended in an unbroken line from Spain to the banks 

of the Indus. 

Such a list gives no mean place to the Semitic family of 

nations; but those of the Aryan stock are perhaps even 

more conspicuous. This family (which is some- 

The Aryan ti n d j hetic or descendants of Japhet) 

races. J r . . . 

includes the Hindus and Persians among Asiatic 

nations, and almost all the peoples of Europe. It may 
seem strange that we English should be related not only 



THE ARYAN RACES. 99 

to the Germans and Dutch and Scandinavians, but to the 
Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, French, Spanish, Italians, 
Romans, and Greeks as well; stranger still that we can 
claim kinship with such distant peoples as the Armenians, 
Persians, and Hindus. Yet such is the case, and the way 
in which all these different nations once formed a single 
people, speaking one language, and their subsequent dis- 
persion over the different parts of the world in which we 
now find them, affords one of the most interesting inquiries 
within the range of pre-historic study. What seems actually 
to have been the case is this : In distant ages, somewhere 
about the rivers Oxus and Jaxartes, and on the north of 
that mountainous range called the Hindoo-Koosh, dwelt 
the ancestors of all the nations we have enumerated, forming 
at this time a single and united people, simple and primitive 
in their way of life, but yet having enough of a common 
national life to preserve a common language. They called 
themselves Aryas or Aryans, a word which, in its very 
earliest sense, seems to have meant those who move up- 
wards, or straight; and* hence, probably, came to stand 
for the noble race as compared with other races on whom, 
of course, they would look down. 1 

How long these Aryans had lived united in this their 
early home it is, of course, impossible to say ; but as the 
tribes and families increased in numbers, a separation 
would naturally take place. Large associations of clans, 
would move into more distant districts, the connection 
between the various bodies which made up the nation 
would be less close, their dialects would begin to vary, 
and thus the seeds of new nations and languages would 

1 This is the theory of Aryan origins still most generally accepted. 
It has, however, been maintained by several philologists that there is 
no evidence of an Asiatic origin of the European nations. 

LofC. 



too THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

be sown. The beginning of such a separation was a dis- 
tinction which arose between a part of the Aryan nation, 
who stayed at the foot of the Hindoo-Koosh Mountains, 
and in all the fertile valleys which lie there, and another 
part which advanced farther into the plain. This latter 
received the name Yavanas, which seems to have meant 
the protectors, and was probably given to them because 
they stood as a sort of foreguard between the Aryans, who 
still dwelt under the shadow of the mountains, and the 
foreign nations of the plains. And now, their area being 
enlarged, they began to separate more and more from one 
another; while at the same time, as their numbers increased, 
the space wherein they dwelt became too small for them 
who had, out of one, formed many different peoples. Then 
began a series of migrations, in which the collection of 
tribes who spoke one language and formed one people 
started off to seek their fortune in new lands, and thus for 
ever broke off association with their kindred and their old 
Aryan home. One by one the different nations among 
the Yavanas (the protectors) were infected with this new 
spirit of adventure, and though they took different routes, 
they all travelled westward, and arrived in Europe at 
last. 

A not improbable cause has been suggested of these 
migrations. It is known that, in spite of the immense 
volume of water which the Volga is daily pouring into it, 
the Caspian Sea is gradually drying up, and it has been 
conjectured as highly probable that hundreds of years ago 
the Caspian was not only joined to the Sea of Aral, but 
extended over a large district which is now sandy desert. 
The slow shrinking in its bed of this sea would, by de- 
creasing the rainfall, turn what was once a fertile country 
1 See Chapter I. 



THE ARYAN RACES. 101 



into a desert ; and if we suppose this result taking place 
while the Aryan nations were gradually increasing in num- 
bers, the effect would be to drive them, in despair of finding 
subsistence in the ever-narrowing fertile tract between the 
desert and the mountains, to seek for new homes elsewhere. 
This, at any rate, is what they did. First among them, in 
all probability, started the Kelts or Celts, who, travelling 
perhaps to the south of the Caspian and the north of the 
Black Sea, found their way to Europe, and spread far on 
to the extreme west. At one time it is most likely that 
the greater part of Europe was inhabited by Kelts, who 
party exterminated and partly mingled with the stone-age <J 
men whom they found there. As far as we know of their 
actual extension in historic times we find this Keltic 
family living in the north of Italy, in Switzerland, over 
all the continent of Europe west of the Rhine, and in 
the British Isles; for the Gauls, who then inhabited the 
northern part of continental Europe west of the Rhine, 
the ancient Britons, and probably the Iberians, the ancient 
inhabitants of Spain, belonged to this family. 1 The High- 
land Scotch, who belong to the old blood, call themselves 
Gaels, and their language Gaelic, which is moreover so like 
the language of the old Irish (who called themselves by 
practically the same name — Gaedhill) that a Highlander 
could make himself understood in Ireland; perhaps he 
might do so in Wales, where the inhabitants are likewise 
Kelts. These words Gael and Gaedhill are of the same 
origin and meaning as Gaul. In the early days of the 
Roman republic the Gauls, as we know, inhabited all the 
north of Italy, and used often to make successful incursions 

1 Among the Iberians, however, the Celtic blood was much diluted 
with an infusion of that of an earlier Turanian race allied to the modern 
Basques. 



102 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

down to the very centre of the peninsula. Beyond the 
Alps they extended as far as into Belgium, which formed 
part of ancient Gaul. So much for the Kelts, v 

Another great family which left the Aryan home was that 
from which descended the Greeks and Romans. 1 The 
primitive ancestors of these two people have been called 
the Pelasgians (Pelasgi), the name which the Greeks gave 
to their own ancestors who lived in the days before the 
name Hellenes was used for the Greek nationality. There 
is evidence of a certa'n early civilization, which is believed 
to have been that of these primitive Pelasgi, in the centre 
of Asia Minor. And it seems probable that the line of 
migration of this nationality passed to the south of the 
Caspian Sea, then through Asia Minor, and finally, not all 
at once, but in successive streams, some across the Helles- 
pont or Dardanelles to the north of Italy and the north 
of Greece, and some to the coast of Asia Minor, and across 
by the islands of the iEgean to the mainland of Greece. 
At every point upon the route there were left behind 
remains — offshoots, as it were, or cuttings from the great 
Pelasgic stem, — a primitive half-Greek stock in the centre 
of Asia Minor, a barbarous half-Greek stock in Thrace and 
Macedon ; while all along the coasts of Asia Minor and 
the Greek Islands, and in the southern parts of European 
Greece (more especially those which looked eastward) there 
arose a much more cultivated race. For in these regions 
the Greeks came in contact with the Phoenicians, and 
gathered much from the civilizations of Egypt and Assyria. 
If there were remains of a primitive Italian race in the 
north of Italy these were (in subsequent, but still pre-historic 

1 Or say, rather, the people of Italy. Only the Etruscans must prob- 
ably be excepted from the category, and the Gauls, who subsequently 
settled themselves in Cisalpine Gaul, 



THE ARYAN RACES. 103 

years) blotted out by the spread of the Gauls beyond the 
Alps. 

How little did these rival nationalities, the Greeks and 
Romans, deem that their ancestors had once formed a 
single people ! All such recollections had been lost to the 
Greeks and Romans, who, when we find them in historic 
times, had invented quite, different stories to account for 
their origin. 

Next we come to two other great families of nations who 
seem to have taken the same route at first, and perhaps 
began their travels together as the Greeks and Romans 
did. These are the Teutons and the Slavs. They seem 
to have travelled by the north of the Caspian and Black 
Sea, extending over all the south of Russia, and down to 
the borders of Greece ; then gradually to have pushed on 
to Europe, ousting the Kelts from the eastern portion, until 
we find them in the historical period threatening the borders 
of the Roman empire on the Rhine and the Danube. Prob- 
ably the Teutons pushed on most to the west, and left the 
Slavs behind. 

The Teutonic family of nations first comes before us 
vaguely in the history of the invasion of Gaul and Italy 
by the Cimbri and the Teutones, which, as we know, was 
checked by Marius in the years 102 and 101 B.C. It is 
probable that both Cimbri and Teutones were of German 
origin, though some have connected the name Cimbri with 
Cymric the native name of the Welsh (whence Cumberland, 
etc.). This attack by the Cimbri and Teutones was only 
an isolated attempt on behalf of the Teutons. The great 
invasion of the Roman empire by them did not begin till 
five centuries later, in 395 a.d. Of the nations who from 
this time forward were engaged in the dismemberment of 
the empire, and in laying the foundations of mediaeval 



104 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

history, almost all seem to have been of Teutonic origin. 
The chief among these nationalities were the Goths — 
divided into two great nationalities, the Visi-Goths (West 
Goths), and the Ostro-Goths (East Goths), who successively 
conquered Italy, and founded kingdoms in Italy, South 
Aquitaine, and Spain. Then there were the Vandals, the 
Burgundians, the Alani and the Suevi, who invaded Gaul 
at the beginning of the fifth century, and passed on, some 
of them, to found kingdoms in Spain and Africa. There 
were the Lombards who succeeded the Ostro-Goths as 
conquerors of Italy; the Franks who subdued the Bur- 
gundians and the Visi-Goths ; the Bavarians who settled in 
the Roman provinces of Vindelicia and Noricum, the 
English (Saxons, Angles, and Jutes) who settled in the 
Roman province of Britain. All these nations carved for 
themselves new states out of the fragments of the Roman 
empire, and these states have for the most part remained 
unchanged till our day. And of all those other German 
states, many of which were acquired by driving back the 
Slavs {e.g. modern Saxony, Prussia), we need not speak here. 
For we have already said what are the modern nations 
which compose the Teutonic, or be it, for the words are 
the same, the Deutsch, or Dutch family. They are the 
Scandinavians — that is to say, the inhabitants of Sweden, 
Norway, Denmark and Iceland, the English, the Dutch and 
Flemings (most of the old Keltic inhabitants of Belgium 
were subsequently driven out by Teutonic invaders), and 
the Germans. 

Lastly, we come to the Slavonians (Slavs), about whom and 
the Panslavonic movement which is to weld all the Slavonic 
peoples into one great nationality we have heard so much in 
recent years. The word Slav comes from slowan, which in 
old Slavonian meant to 'speak,' and was given by the 



THE ARYAN RACES. io$ 

Slavonians to themselves as the people who alone, in their 
view, spoke intelligibly. Just so the Greek word fidpftapoi 
(barbaroi), from which we get our word barbarians, arose, in 
obedience to a like prejudice, only from the imitation of 
people babbling or making unintelligible sounds — ' bar- 
bar-bar.' But among the Germans who conquered and 
enslaved the people, Slav became synonymous with the Latin 
servus, and from them it passed on to express the idea of 
slave — esclave, schiavo, etc. The Slavonic people once 
extended much farther to the west in Northern Europe 
than they do at present — as far, for instance, as the Elbe in 
Northern Germany. We begin to hear of them in history 
about the age of Charlemagne — a little, that is, before 
the end of the eighth century, a.d. The Obotriti and the 
Wiltzi are the names of two Slavonic nations on the Baltic, 
of whom we hear much about this time. But they can no 
longer be identified as the ancestors of any existing race. 
In the reign of Charlemagne's grandson, called Lewis the 
German, we hear much of other Slavonic peoples whose 
names have more meaning for us — the Sorabians, the Czechs 
{i.e. Bohemians), the Mahren or Moravians, and the Carin- 
thians, who, if they have as separate peoples ceased to 
exist, have left behind them their names in the lands they 
inhabited. 

The same has been the case with other Slavonic peoples 
who appear later in history — the Pomeranians and the 
Prussians (earlier Borussians) and the Silesians. The 
people who now bear these names and inhabit these countries 
are by origin almost exclusively Teutonic ; but the names 
themselves and the earlier inhabitants were not Teutons, 
but Slavs. 

The existing Slavonic nationalities are the Russians, 
Lithuanians (incorporated in Russia), the Poles, the Czechs 



106 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

or Bohemians, the Bulgarians, Servians, Montenegrins, etc., 
— most, in fact, of the nations of the Southern Danube. 

This is the classification of nationalities by their language 
No classification is perfect ; and we know, as an historical 

Pre-historic ^ act ' tnat manv nations have abandoned then 
research original tongue, and adopted that of some 
through other people — their conquerors probably, — as 

language. the Gaulg and Gothg ^ Iber j ans ) of F rance 

and Spain have adopted the Latin of the Romans, as the 
Highland Scottish, the Irish, the Welsh and Cornishmen 
have adopted English. 

But a classification by language is far more satisfactory 
than any other sort of classification of nations. For when 
we think of nations we do not think first of all of their 
physique. The most important thing to know about them 
is not their hair was dark or red, their eyes brown or blue. 
What we care most to learn are their national character, 
their thoughts, their beliefs, their forms of social life. And 
for the days when we have no national literature, no history, 
to guide us, almost the only means of gaining reliable 
information upon these points is by a study of the language 
of the people in question. Language holds within it far 
better than do tumuli or weapons, or articles of pottery or 
woven-stuffs or ornaments, the records of long- past times, 
records of material civilization and mental culture likewise. 
It holds these records, as a chemist would say, in solution 
in it ; not visible perhaps to the mere passer-by ; but if we 
know how to precipitate the solution it is wonderful what 
results we obtain. 

No sooner has he finished his classification of languages 
than a mine of almost exhaustless wealth then opens before 
the philologist — a mine, too, which has at present been only 



RESEARCH THROUGH LANGUAGE. 107 

broached. He soon learns the laws governing the changes 
of sound from one tongue into another. We have noted 
experimentally some of these laws in the more simple rela- 
tionships of language, as between English and German, where 
'tag' becomes 'day,' 'dorf 'thorpe,'and the like; and all 
relationships of language are answerable to similar rules. 
There are laws for the change of sound from Sanskrit into 
the primitive forms of Greek, Latin, German, English, etc., 
just as there are laws of change between the first two or the 
last two. 1 So we soon learn to recognize a word in one lan- 
guage which reappears in altered guise in another. And it 
may be well imagined how valuable such knowledge can be 
made. If we find a word common say to Greek and Latin, 
signifying some simple object, a weapon, a tool, an animal, 
a house, it is not over-likely that it will have changed from 
the time when it was first employed : the words of this kind 
which are now in use have, we know, little tendency to 
change. So that the time when this word was first used is 
in all probability the time when the thing was first known 
to primitive man ; and if the word is common to the whole 
Aryan family, or if it is peculiar to a portion only, then it is 
argued that the thing was known or unknown before the 
separation of the Aryan folk. I do not, of course, say that 
rule is never at fault, only that this is a better criterion 
than any other sort of research would afford us, and that 
by this method of word-comparison we get no bad picture 
of the world of our earliest Aryan ancestors. 

It might well have happened that when the migrations 
began our ancestors were still like the stone-age men of the 
shell-mounds, still in the hunter condition ; that they knew 

1 The principal among these laws were elaborated by Jacob Grimm, 
and hence called ' Grimm's Laws. ' They may be seen in his Teutonic 
Grammar, and also in his History of the German Tongue. 



108 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

nothing of domesticated animals, or of pastures and hus- 
bandmen : or it might be, again, that they had left the 
pastoral state long behind, and that all their ideas asso- 
ciated themselves with agriculture, with the division of the 
land, and with the recurring seasons for planting. The 
evidence of language, dealt with after the fashion we have 
described, points to the belief that the ancient Aryans had 
only made some beginnings of agriculture, as a supplement 
to their natural means of livelihood, their flocks and herds : 
for among the words common to the whole Aryan race 
there are very few connected with farming, whereas their 
vocabulary is redolent of the herd, the cattle-fold, the 
herdsman, the milking-time. Even the word daughter, 
which corresponds to the Greek thugater and the Sanskrit 
duhitar, means in the last language ' the milker,' and that 
seems to throw back the practice of milking to a vastly 
remote antiquity. 1 

On the other hand, the various Indo-European branches 
have different names for the plough, one name for the 
German races, another for the Graeco-Italic, and for the 
Sanskrit. And though aratru?n has a clear connection with 
a Sanskrit root ar, it is not absolutely certain that it ever 
had in this language the sense of ploughing, and not merely 
of wounding, which is a still more primitive meaning of the 
same root, whence came the expression for ploughing as of 
wounding the earth. 

Or say we wish to form some notion of the social life of 
the Aryans. Had they extended ideas of tribal government ? 

1 Because they would be hardly likely to give a fresh name to such 
an intimate relationship as the daughter. On the other hand, it seems 
necessary that the Aryan race must have been in the hunter state at 
some period, and equally necessary that they must then have had a 
word for daughter. Milking, it may be urged, might be practised 
before the domestication of animals. See also Chapter VI. 



RESEARCH THROUGH LANGUAGE. 109 



Had they kings, or were they held together only by the 
units of family life? Our answer would come from an 
examination of their common word for ' king.' If they have 
no common word, then we may guess that the title and 
office of kingship arose among the separate Aryan people 
and received a name from each. Or is it that their common 
word for king had first some simpler signification, ' father,' 
perhaps, showing that among the Aryan folk the social bond 
was still confined within the real or imaginary boundary of 
the family ? In fact we do find a common word for king 
in several of the Aryan languages which has no subsidiary 
meaning less than that of directing, or keeping straight. 
This is the Latin rex, the Gothic riks, Sanskrit rig, etc., and 
its earliest ascertainable meaning was ' the director/ The 
Aryans then, even in those days, acknowledged as supreme 1 
some director chosen (probably) from out of the tribe, a 
chief to lead their common warlike or migratory expeditions. 
These are but illustrations of the method upon which are 
founded all conclusions touching these our ancestors, and 
the manner of our knowledge concerning them ; far better 
obtained than merely by gazing upon the instruments which 
have fallen from their hands, or the monuments they might 
have raised to commemorate the dead. The difference, in 
truth, between relics such as these which lie enclosed in 
language, and the weapons and tombs of the Stone Ages, 
is exactly the difference between Shakespeare's statue in 
Westminster Abbey or his bust at Stratford, and that ' live- 
long monument' whereof Milton spoke. By perfecting 
beyond the power of any other race the wonderfully complex 
faculty of speech the Aryans secured that their memory 
should be handed on the more certainly, and with far 

1 Supreme, because his title became a supreme title among these 
different Aryan stocks. 



no THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

greater completeness, than by records left palpable to men's 
eyes and hands. Many of their secret thoughts might be 
unlocked by the same key. Already the same means are 
being used to give us glimpses of their religious ideas. For 
the names of the common Aryan gods can be arrived at by 
just the same comparative method : it may well happen that 
a name which is only a proper name in one language, can in 
another be traced to a root which unravels its original 
meaning. It was so, we saw, with the word daughter. Here 
the Sanskrit root seems to unravel the hidden^the lost, and 
so hidden — meaning in the Greek or English words. So 
with a god, the meaning of a name, concealed from the 
sight of those who used it in prayer or praise, becomes re- 
vealed to us by the divining rod of the science of language. 

And it is true, nevertheless, that the mine of wealth thus 
opened has as yet been but cursorily explored. 1 There are 
far more and greater fish in this sea than ever came out of it. 
Some day, perhaps, a strictly scientific method may be found 
for classifying and tracing the changes which words undergo. 
Sometimes a word is found greatly modified ; sometimes it 
survives almost intact between the different tongues. Is 
there any reason for this ? At present we cannot say. 

The question might be answered by means of an elaborate 
classification under the head of the alterations which words 
have undergone, 2 and such a comparative vocabulary would 

1 And this without any reproach to the industry of those at work. 
The volumes of Kiihn's Zeitschr. fur vergleichende Sprachforschung, 
Lazarus and Steinthal's Zeitsch.f. Volkerpsychologie, M. Pictet's fasci- 
nating Origines indo-europeemies, etc., are storehouses which display 
the treasures already obtained. 

2 Such a book as we have imagined would form a natural sequel to 
the principles of comparative grammar as laid down by Bopp, etc. 
It would differ from a mere comparative dictionary in the arrangement, 
showing the mature and extent of modification which each word had 



RESEARCH THROUGH LANGUAGE. m 

lead to the solution of infinite questions concerning the 
growth of nations. We should be able to look almost into 
the minds of people long ago, better than we can examine 
the minds of contemporary races in a lower mental condition, 
and see what ideas took a strong hold upon them, what 
things they treated as realities, what metaphorically, and 
how large for them was the empire of imagination. 

Next there is the boundless field of proper names, both 
those of persons and geographical names. These last in 
every country bear a certain witness to the races who have 
passed through that country, and show — roughly at least — 
the order of their appearance there. The older geographical 
names will be those of natural features, rivers, mountains, 
lakes, which have been never absent from the scene; the 
newer names will be those bestowed upon the works of 
man. In our own country this is the case. The names of 
our rivers (Thames, Ouse, Severn, Wye) are nearly all 
Keltic, i.e. British ; those of our towns are Teutonic, Saxon 
or Norse. Some few Roman names linger on, as in the 
name and termination ' Chester ; ' but this, as meaning a 
place of strength, shows us clearly the reason of its survival. 
Every European country has changed hands, as ours has 
done ; nay, every country in the world. 1 So here again we 

undergone — where, for instance, Grimm's laws of change hold good, 
where not ; the cases of the survival of archaic forms (agreeable to 
Grimm's second laiu) ; and, if they could be discovered as the result of 
such a classification, the determining causes of such survival among any 
of the different races. 

1 I have been told that the late Lord Strangford, a great linguist, 
and a comparative philologist to boot, could always find amusement 
for an idle half-hour in a book which the reader would probably 
think of, if asked to name the most uninteresting of created things — I 
mean Bradshaw, English or foreign ; and his interest lay in extracting 
the hidden meaning and history which lay concealed in these lists of 
geographical names. 



H2 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

have promise of plenty of work for the philologist in com- 
piling a ' Glossary of Proper Names ' with etymologies. 

Lastly, let it not be forgotten that a great part of all that 
has been done for the Aryan can be done likewise for the 
Semitic languages — a field as yet little turned by the plough ; 
and the reader will confess the debt the world is likely some 
day to owe to Comparative Philology. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE NATIONS OF THE OLD WORLD. 

When we try and gather into one view the results of our 
inquiries upon the kindreds and nations of the old world, it 
must be confessed we are struck rather by the 
extent of our ignorance than of our knowledge. . ... . 

For all the light we are able to shed, the move- 
ments and the passage of the various races in this pre- 
historic time appear to the eye of the mind most like the 
movement of great hosts of men seen dimly through a mist. 
Or shall we say that we are in the position of persons living 
upon some one of many great military highways, while before 
their eyes pass continually bodies of troops in doubtful pro- 
gress to and fro, affording- to them, where they stand, no in- 
dication of the order of battle or the plan of the campaign ? 
Still, to men in such a position there would be more or less 
of intelligence possible in the way in which they watched the 
steps of those who passed before them ; and we, too, though 
we cannot attempt really to follow the track of mankind 
down from the earliest times, may yet gather some idea of 
the changing positions which from age to age have been 
occupied by the larger divisions of our race. 

In the Bible narrative continuous history begins, at the 
earliest, not before the time of Abraham. In the earlier 

i 



ii4 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

chapters of Genesis we find only scattered notices of indivi- 
duals who dwelt in one particular corner of the world, nothing 
to indicate the general distribution of races, or the continuous 
lapse of time. It is, moreover, a fact that, owing partly to 
the associations of childhood, we are apt, by a too literal 
interpretation, to rob the narrative of some part of its 
historical value. Here, proper names, which we might be 
inclined to take for the names of single individuals, often 
stand for whole races, and sometimes for the countries which 
gave their names to the people dwelling in them. ' Son of,' 
too, must not be taken in its most literal meaning, but in 
the wider, and in old languages the perfectly natural, sense 
of ' descended from.' When nations kept the idea of a 
common ancestor before their minds, in a way with which we 
of the present day are quite unfamiliar, it was very customary 
to describe any one person of that people as the ' son of 
the common ancestor. Thus a Greek who wished to bring 
before his hearers the common nationality of the Greek 
people — the Hellenes — would speak of them as being the 
sons of Hellen, of the ^Eolians or Ionians as sons of ^Eolus 
or Ion. In another way, again, an Athenian or Theban 
might speak of his fellow-citizens as sons of Athens or of 
Thebes. Such language among any ancient people is not 
poetical or hyperbolical language, but the usual speech of 
every day. It is in a similar fashion that in the Bible narra- 
tive, centuries are passed rapidly over. And if the remains of 
the stone ages lift a little the veil which hides man's earliest 
doings upon earth, it must be confessed that the light which 
these can shed is but slight and partial. We catch sight of 
a portion of the human race making their rude implements 
of stone and bone, living in caves as hunters and fishers, 
without domestic animals and without agriculture, but 
not without faculties which raise them far above the level 



FOUR RACES OF MANKIND. 115 

of the beasts by which they are surrounded. Yet of these 
early men we may say we know not whence they come or 
whither they go. We cannot tell whether the picture which 
we are able to form of man of the earliest time — of the first 
stone age — is a general or a partial picture ; whether it 
represents the majority of his fellow-creatures, or only a 
particular race strayed from the first home of man. 

We must therefore be content to resign the hope of 
anything like a review of man's life since the beginning. 
Before we see him clearly, he had probably Black 

spread far and wide over the earth, and yellow, red, 
already separated into the three or four most and white 
important divisions of the race. It is usual races ' 

to divide the human race into four divisions named after, 
but not entirely founded upon, the colour of their skins. 
These divisions are the black, yellow, red, and white races. 
I do not propose to go into any elaborate description either 
of the peculiarities or the habitat of these four sections of 
humanity. The greater part of mankind have no place in 
history properly so called. We know them only in the 
present, their past is lost for ever. And the present volume 
being designed to open the door to history is really not 
concerned with races such as these. It will be enough very 
briefly to indicate the main characteristics of the four races 
of mankind, and to refer the reader for more information to 
the chapter in Mr. Tylor's Anthropology dealing with the 
subject. 

The black or negro race, then, consists of two divisions 
the negroes of Africa, and the negroes of certain among the 
the islands of the Pacific bordering upon Aus- 
tralia and called Melanesia. This Melanesia, R 
or ' the negro islands ' as we might call them, 
include Tasmania, New Guinea, and a great number of 



n6 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

smaller islands. But they do not include Australia and 
New Zealand, the inhabitants of both which countries 
have physical features differing from those of the genuine 
negro, though the Australian type approaches very near 
to his. The colour of the skin is not really the chief 
characteristic of this race, but far more so is the very crisp 
hair (what is called wool), the very flat and broadened nose, 
the broad lips, and the advanced under-jaw, or, as it is 
called, the prognathism of the face. This black race has 
never had anything that deserves to be called either a 
literature or a history. 

The red race, which we will take next, is that which inhabits 

or, till the Europeans came, inhabited the whole of America, 

North and South, except the extreme North, 

„ the country of the Eskimo. We take these 

Races. J 

people next because they are almost as un- 
known to history as are the negroes. The peculiarities 
of the red races are their red skin, their high cheek-bones, 
the straight black hair which, exactly opposite to that of 
the negro, never curls. 1 This race has not been quite 
so stationary as the negro. Some of its members, the 
Aztecs of Mexico, the Incas of Peru, did attain to a con- 
siderable civilization. But they had advanced no way in 
the art of writing or keeping records of their past, which 
is thus wholly lost to us ; and we have no means of con- 
necting the civilization of the red races with the civilization 
of that part of the world which has had a history. 

We are therefore left to deal with the two remaining 
classes, the yellow and the white. The oldest, that is to 
say apparently the least changed, of these is the yellow 

1 It is found that the peculiarity of curling or not curling in hair 
depends upon the form, the form in section, of the individual hairs. 
The woolly hairs are oval in section, the straight ones round. 



THE YELLOW RACES. 117 

race, and perhaps their most typical representatives are the 
Chinese. The type is a sufficiently familiar one. 'The 
skull of the yellow race is rounded in form. 
The oval of the head is larger than with Euro- R aces 
peans. The cheek-bones are very projecting; 
the cheeks rise towards the temples, so that the outer corners 
of the eyes are elevated ; the eyelids seem half closed. The 
forehead is flat above the eyes. The bridge of the nose is 
flat, the chin short, the ears disproportionately large and pro- 
jecting from the head. The colour of the skin is generally 
yellow, and in some branches turns to brown. There is 
little hair on the body ; beard is rare. The hair of the head 
is coarse, and, like the eyes, almost always black.' x In the 
present day the different families of the globe have gone 
through the changes which time and variety of climate 
slowly bring about in all; and the yellow race has not 
escaped these influences. While some of its members have 
by a mixture with white races or by gradual improvement, 
reached a type not easily distinguishable from the European, 
others have, through the effect of climate, approached more 
nearly to the characteristics of the black family. We may, 
however, still class these divergent types under the head of 
the yellow race, which we consequently find extending over 
a vast portion of our globe. Round the North Pole the 
Eskimo, the Lapps, and the Finns form a belt of people 
belonging to this division of mankind. Over all Northern 
and Central Asia the various tribes of Mongolian or Tura- 
nian race inhabiting the plains of Siberia and of Tartary, 
and again the Thibetans, the Chinese, Siamese, and other 
kindred peoples of Eastern Asia, are members of this 
yellow family. From the Malay peninsula the same race 
has spread southward, passing from land to land over the 
1 Lenormant, Manual of the Ancient History of the East, vol. i., p. 55- 



Ii8 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

countless isles which cover the South Pacific, until they 
have reached the islands which lie around the Australian 
continent, the islands of Folynesia in the South Pacific, 
and have mingled with the negro race that had preceded 
them there and that remains unmixed in the Melanesian 
islands. The Maoris, the inhabitants of New Zealand, 
belong to this yellow race ; and the Australians, perhaps, 
represent a mixture of negro and yellow races. In all, this 
division of mankind covers an immense portion of the 
globe stretching from Greenland in a curved line, through 
North America and China, downwards to New Zealand, 
and again westward from China through Tartary or Siberia, 
up to Lapland in the north of Europe. And it must 
be added that many anthropologists consider the red races 
of America only a variety of this wide-spread yellow 
race. 

From the results of the previous chapter we see that to 
the yellow race must be attributed all those peoples of 

Europe and Asia which speak agglutinative 
Races languages, and therefore that for the white race 

are left the inflected tongues. These it will 
be remembered, we divided into two great families, the 
Semitic and the Aryan or Japhetic. We thus see that from 
the earliest times to which we are able to point we have 
living in Europe and Asia these three divisions of the 
human family, whom some have looked upon as the 
descendants of Ham, Shem, and Japhet. What relation- 
ship the other excluded races of mankind, the black and 
red, bear to the Hamites, Shemites, and Japhetites, has 
not been suggested. It seems more reasonable to consider 
Noah as merely the ancestor of the white races, and, there- 
fore, so far as our linguistic knowledge goes, of the Semetic 
and Aryan families of speech only. But outside the pure 



THE WHITE RACES. 119 

Semites there lived a race of a less pure nationality, spring- 
ing, probably, from a mixture of Semites with earlier black 
and yellow races. These people we may distinguish as 
Hamites. A division of this race were the Cushites, the 
stock from which the Egyptian, the Chaldsean, and many 
of the Canaanite nations were mainly formed. 

But though from the earliest times there were probably 
in Asia these three divisions of mankind, their relative 
position and importance was very different from what it is 
now. At the present time the Turanian races are every- 
where shrinking and dwindling before the descendants 
of Japhet. At the moment at which I write it is the 
Aryan Slavs who are pushing the yellow-skinned Tartars 
farther and farther back in Siberia and Central Asia, and 
are endeavouring to push the Mongolian Turks from 
their last foothold in Europe. 1 The Tartar races have 
had their era of great conquest too, for to them belong 
those races — Huns, Avars, Magyars — who have spread 
such devastation in Europe, to them belong such con- 
querors as Attila, Genghis Khan, and Timur Lenk (Tamer- 
lane). In the first few centuries after Mohammedism 
was introduced among them, the Turanians of Central 
Asia rose into power. Several different Tartar races in suc- 
cession — Seljuks, Ayyubites, Mongols (Moghuls), etc. — 
rose upon the ruins of the Arab Chalifate, and invaded 
India., Persia, Africa, and Europe. The last of these is the 
race of the Osmanlis, or, as we call them simply, the Turks. 
Their days of conquest are past, and therefore, great as is the 
space which the Turanian people now occupy over the face 
of the globe, there is reason to believe that in early pre- 
historic times they were still more widely extended. In all 

1 Not that this particular foothold has descended to the Turks from 
early times. See the next paragraph. 



THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



probability the men of the polished-stone age in Europe and 
Asia were of this yellow-skinned Mongolian type. We know 
that the human remains of this period seem to have come 
from a short and round-skulled people ; and this roundness 
of the skull is one of the chief marks of the Mongolians as 
distinguished from the white races of mankind. 

We know, too, that the earliest inhabitants of India 
belonged to a Turanian, and therefore to a yellow, race ; 
and that Turanians mingled with one of the oldest historical 
Semitic peoples, and helped to produce the civilization of 
the Chaldaeans. And as, moreover, we find in various parts 
of Asia traces of a civilization similar to that of Europe 
during the latter part of the polished-stone age, it seems not 
unreasonable, in casting our eyes back upon the remotest 
antiquity on which research sheds any light, to suppose an 
early widespread Turanian or Mongolian family extending 
over the greater part of Europe and Asia. These Turanians 
were in various stages of civilization or barbarism, from the 
rude condition of the hunters and fishers of the Danish 
shell-mounds to a higher state reigning in Central and 
Southern Asia, and similar to that which was afterwards 
attained towards the end of the polished-stone age in 
Europe. The earliest home of these pure Turanians was 
probably a region lying somewhere to the east of Lake Aral. 
' There,' says a writer from whom we have already quoted, 
' from very remote antiquity they had possessed a peculiar 
civilization, characterized by gross Sabeism, peculiarly 
materialistic tendencies, and complete want of moral 
elevation; but at the same time, by an extraordinary 
development in some branches of knowledge, great pro- 
gress in material culture in some respects, while in others 
they remained in an entirely rudimentary state. This 
strange and incomplete civilization exercised over great part 



EGYPT. 121 



of Asia an absolute preponderance, lasting, according to the 
historian Justin, 1500 years.' 1 

As regards its pre-historic remains, we know that this 
civilization, or half-civilization, was especially distinguished 
by the raising of enormous grave-mounds and altar-stones, 
and it must have been characterized by strong, if not by the 
most elevated, religious ideas, and by a peculiar reverence 
paid to the dead. Now, we have seen that it is by charac- 
teristics very similar to these that the civilization of Egypt 
is distinguished, and Egypt, of all nations which have pos- 
sessed a history, is the oldest. 

These are reasons, therefore, for considering the Egyptian 
civilization, which is in some sort the dawn of history in the 
world, as the continuation — the improvement, 
no doubt, but still the continuation — of the §yp ' 
half-civilization of the age of stone, a culture handed on 
from the Turanian to the Cushite peoples. We may look 
upon this very primitive form of culture as spreading first 
through Asia, and later on outwards to the west. Four 
thousand and five thousand years before Christ are the dates 
disputed over as those of Menes, the first recorded King of 
Egypt. 2 And Egypt even at this early time seems to have 
emerged from the age of stone, and been possessed, at least, 
of bronze, possibly of iron. The later date, 4000 B.C., 
probably marks the beginning of the stone-age life corre- 
sponding to the more extensive remains in Europe. It 
was therefore with this early culture as it has been with 
subsequent fuller civilizations — 

1 Lenormant, Manual, i. 343. It should be remarked that the autho- 
rity of Justin on such a point is not high. 

2 Mariette's date is B.C. 5004, Lepsius's 3892, Wilkinson's only 
2700. Wilkinson's chronology, however, founded upon the theory of 
contemporaneous dynasties in the lists of Manetho, has now been generally 
rejected. 



122 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

* Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelis 
Illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper. ' 

The Egyptian civilization which (for us) begins with 
Menes, say 5000 B.C., reaches its zenith under the third and 
fourth dynasty, under the builders of the pyramids some 
eight hundred or a thousand years afterwards. Then in its 
full strength the Egyptian life rises out of the past like a 
giant peak, or like its own pyramids out of the sandy plains. 
It is cold and rigid, like a mass of granite, but it is so great 
that it seems to defy all efforts of time. Even when the 
Egyptians first come before us everything seems, to point 
them out as a people already old; whether it be their 
enormous tombs and temples, their elaborately ordered 
social life, or their complicated religious system, with its 
long mysterious ritual. For all this, the Egyptian life and 
thought present two elements of character which may well 
spring from the union of two distinct nationalities. Its 
enormous tombs and temples and its excessive care for the 
bodies of the dead — for what are the pyramids but exaggera- 
tions of the stone-age grave-mounds, and the temples but 
improvements upon the megalithic dolmens ? — recall the era 
of stone-age culture. The evident remains of an early 
animal worship show a descent from a low form of religion, 
such a religion as we find among Turanian or African races. 
But with these co-existed some much grander features. The 
Egyptians were intellectual in the highest degree, — in the 
highest degree then known to the world ; and, unlike the 
stone-age men, succeeded in other than merely mechanical 
arts. In astronomy they were rivalled by but one nation, 
the Chaldseans ; in painting and sculpture they were at the 
head of the world, and were as nearly the inventors of history 
as of writing itself, — not quite of either, as will be seen here- 
after. Mixed, too, with their animal worship were some lofty 



CHALD^EA. 123 



religious conceptions stretching not only beyond it — the 
animal worship — but beyond that ' natural ' polytheism which 
was the earliest creed of our own ancestors the Aryans, 
and a noble hope and ambition for the future of the soul. 
Were these higher features due to the influx of Semitic 
blood ? It seems likely, when we remember how from the 
same race came a chosen people to whom the world is 
indebted for all that is greatest in religious thought. 

During the fourth and fifth dynasties, or some three or 
four thousand years before Christ, Egypt and the Egyptians 
do, as we have said, rise up distinctly out of the region of 
mere conjecture. Three or four thousand years before 
Christ — five or six thousand years ago : this is no small 
distance through which to look back to the place where the 
first mountain-peak of history appears in view. What was 
doing in the other unseen regions round this mountain? 
Only probably in one other part of the globe -,, ,, 
could there have been found at this date a 
civilization in the smallest degree comparable to that of the 
Egyptians. This region is the valley of the Tigrus and 
Euphrates. 

The Tigro- Euphrates valley, or Mesopotamia, was in early 
days as regards appearance and position very similar to the 
land of Egypt. These two territories are in fact two oases 
in an immense band of desert, which stretches from the 
western edge of the great Sahara (which is almost the edge of 
Africa itself) in a curved sweep, through part of Arabia, part 
of Persia, up to the great plains of central Asia ; in other 
words, it stretches across more than one-third of the cir- 
cumference of the globe. The Tigro-Euphrates oasis which 
the Greeks called Mesopotamia is in the Bible called 
Chaldsea or the country of the Chaldees. In days known 
to history, its inhabitants were a mixed people, of whom 



124 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

the oldest element was undoubtedly Turanian; and this 
section of the nation had probably descended from the 
country afterwards called Iran to the mouths of the Tigris 
and Euphrates. These people are called by modern 
scholars the Accadians, or the Shumiro-Accadians. 1 They 
are the Accad of the Bible. Mixed with them were a people 
of Semitic, or half-Semitic origin, whose language is closely 
allied to the Hebrew and the Aramaean. If we take the 
Biblical name for them, we should call them Hamites or 
Cushites. But the best ethnological name would be that of 
Aramaeans. 

These two races mingled, and formed the nation of 
Chaldseans as known to history ; and in time the Semitic 
element predominated over the Turanian. Nevertheless 
it was the Accadians who had brought to the common 
stock the earliest elements of civilization. Their earliest 
tombs show them in possession of both the metals bronze 
and iron, though of the latter in such small quantities that 
it took with them the position of a precious metal ; orna- 
ments were made from it as much as from gold. What is 
far more important, the Accadians possessed a hieroglyphic 
writing similar in character to that of the Egyptians, and, 
after their junction with the Semite people, that developed 
into a syllabic alphabet. 2 We may date the fusion of the 
Accadian and Aramaean peoples at about 4000 B.C. 

It is in this country, be it remembered, in the Tigro- 
Euphrates basin, that the Bible places the earliest history of 
the human race. ' And it came to pass that as they journeyed 
from the East they found a plain in the land of Shinar ; and 
they dwelt there.' 3 Here, too, is placed the building of 
Babel, and the subsequent dispersion of the human family. 

1 Shumir was a portion of the country inhabited by the Accadians. 
2 See Chapter XIII. 3 Gen. xi. 2. 



CHALD^EA. 125 



Here ruled Nimrod, ' the son of Cush,' the first of the kings 
of this region of whom any authentic mention is made ; 
though we have dynastic lists of supernatural beings who 
were supposed to have reigned in Chaldsea in far distant 
ages of the world, as we have in the case of Egypt. Even 
of Nimrod's reign no monumental records have yet come 
to light. The cities which Nimrod built, says the Bible, 
were Erech [in Accadian, Ounoug, or Uruk] and Ur 
[Accad. Uru] — these two are the present Warkah and 
Mugheir, — Accad [Agade] and Calneh. But the earliest 
human king of whom we have anything like an authentic 
date is either Sargon I., who may have reigned as early as 
3800 B.C., or Urbagus, who seems to have ruled over all 
Mesopotamia, contemporaneously with the fifth Egyptian 
dynasty (3900 or 2900 B.C.). 

The Chaldean buildings of this period, like the con- 
temporary Egyptian ones, are of gigantic proportions, and 
like them seem to recall bygone days, the grandiose concep- 
tions of the later stone-age, those tumuli and. cromlechs which, 
spread over the face of the world, most undoubtedly have 
suggested to subsequent nations of mankind the belief in a 
giant race which had preceded them on earth — 

' The far-famed hold, 
Piled by the hands of giants 
For god-like kings of old.' 

And thus, as has already been often said, this earliest civili- 
zation in the world looks back to pre-historic days as much 
as forward to historic ones. 

Close beside Chaldaea, in the more mountainous country 
to the east, but not far from the Persian Gulf, rose another 
civilization, that of the Elamites, which may possibly have 
been not much later than the Chaldaean. This, too, we 
may believe, was in its origin Turanian. The capital of 



126 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

the country of Elam was Susa. Between 2300 and 2280 
B.C., a king of Susa, Kurdur-Nankunty, conquered the 
reigning king of Chaldaea, and henceforward the two dis- 
tricts were incorporated into one country. The accession 
of strength thus gained to his crown induced one of the 
kings of the Elamitic line, Kudur-lagomer (Chedorlaomer) 
by name, to aspire towards a wider empire (c. 2200 B.C.). 
He sent his armies against the Semitic nations on his 
west, who were now beginning to settle down in cities, 
and to enjoy their share of the civilization of Egypt 
and Chaldsea. These he subdued, but after sixteen years 
they rebelled; and it was after a second expedition to 
punish their recalcitrancy, wherein he had conquered the 
kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, and had among the prisoners 
taken Lot, the nephew of Abraham, that Chedorlaomer was 
pursued and defeated by the patriarch. 'And when 
Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he 
armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three 
hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan. And 
he divided himself against them, he and his servants, by 
night, and smote them, and pursued them unto Hobah, 
which is on the left hand of Damascus. And he brought 
back all the goods, and also brought again his brother 
Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people.' x 

The conquest of a powerful Chaldsean king by a handful 
of wandering Semites seems extraordinary, and might have 
sounded a note of warning to the ear of the Chaldseans. 
Their kingdom was destined soon to be overthrown by 
another Semitic people. After a duration of about half a 
thousand years for the Elamite kingdom, and some seven 
hundred years since the time of Nimrod, the Chaldaean 
dynasty was overthrown and succeeded by an Arabian one, 
1 Gen. xiv. 



CHINA. 127 



'.hat is, by a race of nomadic Shemites from the Arabian 
plains ; and after two hundred and forty-five years they in 
their turn succumbed to another more powerful people of the 
;ame Semitic race, the Assyrians. The empire thus founded 
upon the ruins of the old Chaldaean was one of the greatest 
of the ancient world, as we well know from the records 
which meet us in the Bible. Politically it may be said to 
have balanced the power of Egypt. But the stability of this 
monarchy rested upon a basis much less firm than that of 
Egypt; the southern portion — the old Chaldaea — of which 
Babylon was the capital, was always ready for revolt, and 
after about seven hundred years the Babylonians and Medes 
succeeded in overthrowing their former conquerors. All 
this belongs to history — or at least to chronicle — and is 
therefore scarcely a part of our present inquiry. 

To these primitive civilizations of Egypt, Chaldaea, and 
Susa we might, if we could put faith in native records, be 
inclined to add a fourth. 

The Chinese profess to extend their lists of dynasties 
seven, eight, or even ten thousand years backward, but there 
is nothing on which* to rest such extravagant 
pretensions. Their earliest known book is 
believed to date from the twelfth century before Christ. It is 
therefore not probable that they possessed the art of writing 
more than fifteen hundred years before our era, and before 
writing is invented there can be no reliable history. The best 
record of early times then is to be found in the popular songs 
of a country, and of these China possessed a considerable 
number, which were collected into a book — the Book of Odes 
— by their sage Confucius. 1 The picture which these odes 
present is of a society so very different from that of the time 
from which their earliest book— the Book of Changes— dates, 
1 Kung-foo-tse was his real name. 



128 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

that we cannot refuse to credit it with a high antiquity. 
From the songs we learn that before China coalesced into 
the monarchy which has lasted so many years, its inhabitants 
lived in a sort of feudal state, governed by a number of 
petty princes and lords. The pastoral life which dis- 
tinguished the surrounding Turanian nations had already 
been exchanged for a settled agricultural one, to which 
houses, and all the civilization which these imply, had long 
been familiar. For the rest, their life seems to have been 
then, as now, a simple, slow-moving life, not devoid of piety 
and domestic affection. But it should be mentioned here 
that recent researches seem to point to the conclusion, 
strange as it may appear, that the Chinese civilization is 
closely connected with that of the Accadians, and may have 
had an origin from some contact with the Accadian peoples 
in their earliest homes in Central Asia. In any case it 
hardly seems likely that this can be classed as the fourth 
civilization which may have existed in the world when the 
pyramids were being built. But it is without doubt after 
these three the next oldest of the civilizations which the 
world has known. It seems to be remote alike from the 
half-civilization of the other Mongolian people of the stone 
age, and from the mixed Turanian-Semitic civilizations of 
Egypt and Chaldasa. 

To these early civilizations in the old world, may we add 
any from the new, and believe in a great antiquity of the 
highest civilization of the red race ? The trace of an early 
civilization in Mexico and Peru, bearing many remarkable 
points of resemblance to the civilization of Chaldsea, is 
undoubted. This may have been passed on by the Chinese 
at a very early date. But there is nothing to show that the 
identity in some of the features of their culture extended 
to an identity in their respective epochs. 



ASSYRIANS, PHCENICIANS, HEBREWS. 129 

A greater destiny, though a more tardy development, 
awaited the pure Semitic and Japhetic races. Among the 
former we might notice many nations which Assyrians, 
started into life during the thousand years fol- Phoenicians, 
lowing that date of 3000 B.C., which we have Hebrews. 
taken as our starting-point. Of the Assyrians we have 
already spoken. The next most conspicuous stand the 
Phoenicians, who, either in their early home upon the sea- 
coast of Syria, or in their second home, the sea itself, or 
in one of their countless colonies, came into contact with 
almost every one of the great nations of antiquity, from the 
Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Israelites, to the Greeks 
and Romans. 

But it is upon the life and history of the nomadic 
Shemites, and among them of one chosen people, that our 
thoughts chiefly rest. Among the prouder citied nations 
which inhabited the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, from 
the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea, dwelt a numerous 
people, more or less nomadic in their habits, under the 
patriarchal form of government which belonged to their 
mode of life. Among such a people the chief of one par- 
ticular family or clan was summoned by a Divine call to 
escape from the influence of the idolatrous nations around, 
and to live that vagrant pastoral life which was in such an 
age most fitted for the needs of purity and religious con- 
templation. It is as something like a wandering Bedouin 
chieftain that we must picture Abraham, while we watch 
him, now joining with one small city king against another, 
now driven by famine to travel with his flocks and herds as 
far as Egypt. Then again he returns, and settles in the 
fertile valley of the Jordan, where Lot leaves him, and, 
seduced by the luxuries of a town life, quits his flocks and 
herds and settles in Sodom, till driven out again by the 

K 



i 3 o THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

destruction of that city. And we are not now reading dry 
dynastic lists, but the very life and thought of an early 
time. 1 To us — whose lives are so unsimple — the mere 
picture of this simple nomadic life of early days would have 
an interest and a charm ; but it has a double charm and 
interest viewed by the light of the high destiny to which 
Abraham and his descendants were called. Plying the 
homely, slighted shepherd's trade, these people lived poor 
and despised beside the rich monarchies of Egypt or 
Chaldaea ; one more example, if one more were needed, 
how wide apart lie the empires of spiritual and of material 
things. 

Up to very late times the Children of Israel bore many 
of the characteristics of a nomadic people. It was as a 
nation of shepherds that they were excluded from the 
national life of Egypt. For long years after their departure 
thence they led a wandering life ; and though, when they 
entered Palestine, they found cities ready for their occupa- 
tion — for the nations which they dispossessed were for the 
most part settled people, builders of cities — and inhabited 
them, and, growing corn and wine, settled partly into an 
agricultural life, yet the chief wealth of the nation still 
probably consisted in their flocks, and the greater portion 
of the people still dwelt in tents. This was, perhaps, 
especially the case with the people of the north, for even 
so late as the separation, when the ten tribes determined to 
free themselves from the tyranny of Rehoboam, we know 
how Jeroboam cried out, ' To your tents, O Israel.' ' So 

1 'Fool! why journeyest thou wearisomely in thy antiquarian 
fervour to gaze on the stone pyramids of Geeza, or the clay stones of 
Sacchara ? These stand there, as I can tell thee, idle and inert, look- 
ing over the desert, foolishly enough, for the last three thousand years ; 
but canst thou not open thy Hebrew Bible, or even Luther's version 
thereof?' Sartor Resartus. 



THE ARYANS. 131 



Israel departed unto their tents,' the narrative continues. 

After the separation we are told that Jeroboam built several 

cities in his own dominions. The history of the Israelites 

generally may be summed up as the constant expression 

and the ultimate triumph of a wish to exchange their simple 

life and theocratic government for one which might place 

them more on a level with their neighbour states. At first 

it is their religion which they wish to change, whether for 

the gorgeous ritual of Egypt or for the vicious creeds of 

Asiatic nations ; and after a while, madly forgetful of the 

tyrannies of a Ramses or a Tiglath-Pileser, they desire a 

king to reign over them in order that they may ' take their 

place ' among the other Oriental monarchies. Still their 

first two kings have rather the character of military leaders, 

the monarchy not having become hereditary; the second, 

the warrior-poet, the greatest of Israel's sons, was himself 

in the beginning no more than a shepherd. But under his 

son Solomon the monarchical government becomes assured, 

the country attains (like Rome under Augustus) the summit 

of its splendour and power, and then enters upon its career 

of slow and inevitable decline. 

Now let us turn to the Japhetic people — the Aryans. 

It is curious that the date of three thousand years before 

Christ, from which we started in our glance 

,,,,,,, • -, j -. The Aryans, 

over the world, should also be considered about 

that of the separation of the Aryan people. Till that time 

they had continued to live — since when we know not — in 

their early home near the Oxus and Jaxartes, and we are 

able by the help of comparative philology to gain some 

little picture of their life at the time immediately preceding 

the separation. We have already seen how this picture is 

obtained; how, taking a word out of one of the Aryan 

languages and making allowance for the changed form 



i 3 2 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

which it would wear in the other tongues, if we find the 
same word with the same meaning reappearing in all the 
languages of the family, we may fairly assume that the thing 
for which it stands was known to the old Aryans before the 
separation. If, again, we find a word which runs through 
all the European languages, but is not found in the Sanskrit 
and Persian, we guess that in this case the thing was known 
only to the Yavanas, the first separating body of younger 
Aryans, from whom it will be remembered all the European 
branches are descended. Thus we get a very interesting 
list of words, and the means of drawing a picture of the life 
of our primaeval ancestors. The earliest appearance of the 
Aryans is as a pastoral people, for words derived from the 
pastoral life have left the deepest traces on their language. 
Daughter, we saw, meant originally 'the milker;' the name 
of money, and of booty, in many Aryan languages is derived 
from that of cattle ; * words which have since come to mean 
lord or prince originally meant the guardian of the cattle ; 2 
and others which have expanded into words for district or 
country, or even for the whole earth, meant at first simply 
the pasturage. So not without reason did we say that the 
king had grown out of the head of the family, and the pens 
of sheepfolds expanded into walled cities. 

But though a pastoral, the ancient Aryans do not seem to 
have been a nomadic race, and in this respect they differed 
from the Shemites of the same period, and from the Tura- 
nians, by whom they were surrounded. For the Turanian 
civilization had pretty well departed from Asia by that time, 

1 For example, the Hindee rupee, the Latin pecunia, and our fee. 

2 As the Sanskrit gSpa, ' a prince,' the Slavonic kospodar (from 
gospada) contains the word gd, our 'cow,' and means the protector of 
the cattle ; from the same root, Sanskrit gavya, ' pasturage,' Saxon 
gi, 'county,' Greek gaia, or ge, 'earth.' 



SUMMARY. 133 



and having taught its lessons to Egypt and Chaldsea, lived 
on, if at all, in Europe only. There it faded before the 
advance of the Celts and other Aryan people, who came 
bringing with them the use of bronze weapons and the civi- 
lization which belonged to the bronze age. The stone age 
lingered in the lake dwellings of Switzerland, as we thought, 
till about two thousand years before Christ or perhaps later, 
and it may be that this date, B.C. 2000, which is also nearly 
that of Abraham, represents within a few hundred years the 
entry of the Aryans into Europe. The Greeks are generally 
believed to have appeared in Greece, or at least in Asia 
Minor, about the nineteenth century before our era, and 
they were probably preceded by the Latin branch of the 
Aryan family, as well as by the Celts in the north of 
Europe. So that the period of one thousand years which 
intervened between our starting-point and the call of 
Abraham, the starting-point of the Hebrew history, and 
which saw the growth and change of many great Asiatic 
monarchies, must for the Aryans be only darkly filled up 
by the gradual separation of the different nations, and their 
unknown life between this separation and the time when 
they again become vaguely known to history. 

The general result, then, of our inquiries into the grouping 

of nations of the world in pre-historic times may be sketched 

in rough outline. At a very early date, say n 

. . Summary. 

4000 or 5000 B.C., arose an extensive luraman 

half-civilization, which, flourishing probably in Central and 

Southern Asia, spread in time and through devious routes 

to India and China upon one side, on the other side to 

Europe. This was, at first at any rate, a stone age, and 

was especially distinguished by the raising of great stones 

and grave-mounds. This civilization was communicated 



134 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

to the Egyptians and Chaldaeans, a mixed people — Semite, 
Turanian, Ethiopian — who were not strangers to the use 
of metals. As early as 3000 years before our era the 
civilization of Egypt had attained its full growth, and had 
probably even then a considerable past. Chaldasa, too, 
and the neighbouring Elam were both advanced out of 
their primitive state; possibly so also were China, Peru, 
and Mexico. But the pure Semite peoples, the ancestors 
of the Jews, and the Aryans, were still pastoral races, the 
one by the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the other 
by the banks of the Jaxartes and the Oxus. The first 
of these continued pastoral and nomadic for hundreds of 
years, but about this time the Western Aryans separated 
from those of the East, and soon after added some use of 
agriculture to their shepherd life. Then between 3000 and 
2000 B.C. came the separation of the various peoples of the 
Western Aryans and their migration towards Europe, where 
they began to appear at the latter date. After all the 
Western Aryans had left the East, the older Aryans seem 
to have lived on for some little time together, and at last 
to have separated into the nations of Iranians and Hindus, 
the first migrating southward, and the second crossing the 
Hindoo-Koosh and descending into the plains of the Indus 
and the Ganges. Thence they drove away or exterminated 
most of the older Turanian inhabitants, as their brethren 
had a short time before done to the Turanians whom they 
found in Europe. Such, so far as we can surmise, were in 
rough outline the doings of the different kindreds and 
nations and languages of the old world in times long before 
history. 



CHAPTER VI. 

EARLY SOCIAL LIFE. 

We have seen, so far, that the early traces of man's existence 
point to a gradual improvement in the state of his civiliza- 
tion, to the acquirement of fresh knowledge, 

and the practice of fresh arts. The rude °^! na * ? ° 
r . . settlements. 

stone implements of the early drift-period are 
replaced by the more carefully manufactured ones of the 
polished-stone age, and these again are succeeded by imple- 
ments of bronze and of iron. By degrees also the arts of 
domesticating animals and of tilling the land are learnt; 
and by steps, which we shall hereafter describe, the art of 
writing is developed from the early pictorial rock- sculptures. 
Now, in order that each step in this process of civilization 
should be preserved for the benefit of the next generation, 
and that the people of each period should start from the 
vantage-ground obtained by their predecessors, there must 
have been frequent intercommunication between the different 
individuals who lived at the same time; so that the dis- 
covery or improvement of each one should be made known 
to others, and become part of the common stock of human 
knowledge. In the very earliest times, then, men probably 
lived collected together in societies of greater or less extent 
We know that this is the case now with all savage tribes; 



136 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

and as in many respects the early races of the drift-beds 
seem to have resembled some now existing savage tribes in 
their mode of life, employing, to a certain extent, the same 
implements, and living on the same sort of food, this adds 
to the probability of their gregariousness. The fact, too, 
that the stone implements of the first stone period have 
generally been found collected near together in particular 
places, indicates these places as the sites of early settle- 
ments. Beyond this, however, we can say very little of the 
social state of these early stone-age people. Small traces 
of any burial-ground or tomb of so great an antiquity have 
yet been found, and all that we can say of them with any 
certainty is, that their life must have been very rude and 
primitive. Although they were collected together in 
groups, these groups could not have been large, and each 
must have been generally situated at a considerable dis- 
tance from the next, for the only means of support for the 
men of that time was derived from hunting and fishing. 
Now it requires a very large space of land to support a 
man who lives entirely by hunting; and this must have 
been more particularly the case in those times when the 
weapons used by the huntsman were so rude, that it is 
difficult for us now to understand how he could ever have 
succeeded in obtaining an adequate supply of food by 
such means. Supposing that the same extent of territory 
were required for the support of a man in those times 
as was required in Australia by the native population, the 
whole of Europe could only have supported about seventy- 
six thousand inhabitants, or about one person to every four 
thousand now in existence. 

Next to the cave- dwellings the earliest traces of anything 
like fixed settlements which have been found are the 
'kitchen-middens.' The extent of some of these clearly 



FORMATION OF SETTLEMENTS. 137 

shows that they mark the dwelling-place of considerable 
numbers of people collected together. But here only the 
rudest sort of civilization could have existed, and the 
bonds of society must have been as primitive and simple 
as they are among those savage tribes at the present 
time, who support existence in much the same way as the 
shell-mound people did. In order that social customs 
should attain any development, the means of existence 
must be sufficiently abundant and easily procurable to 
permit some time to be devoted to the accumulation of 
superfluities, or of supplies not immediately required for 
use. The life of the primitive hunter and fisher is so 
precarious and arduous, that he has rarely either the 
opportunity or the will for any other employment than 
the supply of his immediate wants. The very uncertainty 
of that supply seems rather to create recklessness than 
providence, and the successful chase is generally followed 
by a period of idleness and gluttony, till exhaustion of 
supplies once more compels men to activity. That the 
shell-mound people were subject to such fluctuations of 
supply we may gather from the fact that bones of foxes and 
other carnivorous animals are frequently found in those 
mounds ; and as these animals are rarely eaten by human 
beings, except under the pressure of necessity, we may 
conclude that the shell-mound people were driven to 
support existence by this means, through their ill-success 
in fishing and hunting, and their want of any accumulation 
of stores to supply deficiencies. 

The next token of social improvement that is observable 
is in the tumuli, or grave-mounds, which may be referred to 
a period somewhat later than that of the shell-mounds. 
These contain indications that the people who constructed 
them possessed some important elements necessary to their 



I3» THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



social progress. They had a certain amount of time to 
spare after providing for their daily wants, and they did not 
spend that time exclusively in idleness. The erection of 
these mounds must have been a work of considerable labour, 
and they often contain highly finished implements and 
ornaments, which must have been put there for the use of 
the dead. They are evidences that no little honour was 
sometimes shown to the dead ; so that some sort of religion 
must have existed amongst the people who constructed the 
ancient grave-mounds. The importance of this element in 
early society is evident if we inquire further for whom and 
by whom these mounds were erected. Now, they are not 
sufficiently numerous, and are far too laborious in their 
construction, to have been the ordinary tombs of the 
common people. They were probably tombs erected for 
chiefs or captains of tribes to whom the tribes were anxious 
to pay especial honour. We do not know at all how these 
separate tribes or clans came into existence, and what 
bonds united their members together; but so soon as we 
find a tribe erecting monuments in honour of its chiefs, we 
conclude that it has attained a certain amount of compact- 
ness and solidity in its internal relations. Amongst an 
uneducated people there is probably no stronger tie than 
that of a common faith, or a common subject of reverence. 
It is impossible not to believe, then, that the people who 
made these great, and in some cases elaborately constructed 
tombs, would continue ever after to regard them as in some 
sort consecrated to the great chiefs who were buried under 
them. Each tribe would have its own specially sacred 
tombs, and perhaps we may here see a germ of that 
ancestor-worship which may be traced in every variety of 
religious belief. 

It has been supposed by some that a certain amount of 



BARTER. 



139 



commerce or barter existed in the later stone age. The 
reason for this opinion is that implements of stone are 
frequently found in localities where the stone 
of which they are made is not native. At ar er * 
Presigny le Grand, in France, there exists a great quantity 
of a particular kind of flint which seems to have been 
very convenient for the manufacture of implements \ for 
the fields there are covered with flint-flakes and chips 
which have been evidently knocked off in the process 
of chipping out the knives, and arrow-heads, and hatchets 
which the stone-age men were so fond of. Now, imple- 
ments made of this particular kind of flint are found in 
various localities, some of which are at a great distance 
from Presigny; and it has therefore been supposed that 
Presigny was a sort of manufactory for flint weapons which 
were bartered to neighbouring tribes, and by them again 
perhaps to others further off; and so these weapons 
gradually got dispersed. But it is also possible that the 
tribes of the interior, who would subsist almost exclusively 
by hunting, and would therefore be of a more wandering 
disposition than those on the sea-coast, may have paid 
occasional visits to this flint reservoir for the purpose of 
supplying themselves with weapons of a superior quality, 
just as the American Indians are said to go to the quarry 
of Coteau des Prairies on account of the particular kind of 
stone which is found there. 

In any case, whatever system of barter was carried on 
at that time was of a very primitive kind, and not of 
frequent enough occurrence to produce any important 
effects on the social condition of the people. That that 
condition had already advanced to some extent beyond its 
original rudeness, shows us that there existed, at all events, 
some capacity for improvement among the tribes which then 



140 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

inhabited Europe; but, when we compare them with 
modern tribes of savages, whose apparent condition is 
much the same as theirs was, and who do not seem to have 
made any advance for a long period, or, so far as we can 
judge, to be capable of making any advance by their own 
unassisted efforts, we cannot but conclude that the stone- 
age people, if left to themselves, would only have emerged 
out of barbarism by very slow degrees. Now we know that, 
about the time when bronze implements first began to be 
used, some very important changes also occurred in the 
manners and customs of the inhabitants of Europe. A 
custom of burning the dead superseded then the older one 
of burial • domestic animals of various sorts seem to have 
been introduced, and the bronze implements themselves 
show, both in the elaborateness of their workmanship and 
the variety of their designs, that a great change had come 
over European civilization. The greatness and complete- 
ness of this change, the fact that there are no traces of 
those intermediate steps which we should naturally expect 
to find in the development of the arts, denote that this 
change was due to some invading population which brought 
with it the arts that had been perfected in its earlier home ; 
and other circumstances point to the East as the home 
from which this wave of civilization proceeded. Lan- 
guage has taught us that at various times there have been 
large influxes of Aryan populations into Europe. To the 
first of these Aryan invaders probably was due the intro- 
duction of bronze into Europe, together with the various 
social changes which appear to have accompanied its 
earliest use. To trace then the rise and progress of the 
social system which the Aryans had adopted previous to 
their appearance in Europe, we must go to their old Asiatic 
home, and see if any of the steps by which this system had 



THE PATRIARCHAL FAMILY. 141 

sprung up, or any indications of its nature, may be extracted 
from the records of antiquity. 

Hitherto scarcely any attempt has been made to discover 
or investigate pre-historic monuments in the East. We can 
no longer therefore appeal to the records of early -phe 
tombs or temples, to indications taken from early patriarchal 
seats of population ; but though as yet this key f amil y- 
to Aryan history has not been made available, we have 
another guide ready to take us by the hand, and show us 
what sort of lives our ancestors used to lead in their far-off 
Eastern home. That guide is the science of Language, 
which can teach us a great deal about this if we will listen 
to its lessons : a rich mine of knowledge which has as yet 
been only partially explored, but one from which every day 
new information is being obtained about the habits and 
customs of the men of pre-historic times. 

All that we know at present of the Aryan race indicates 
that its social organization originated in a group which is 
usually called the Patriarchal Family, the members of 
which were all related to each other either by blood or 
marriage. At the head of the family was the patriarch, the 
eldest male descendant of its founder ; its other members 
consisted of all the remaining males descended on the 
father's side from the original ancestor, their wives, and such 
of the women, also descended on the father's side from the 
same ancestor, as remained still unmarried. To show more 
exactly what people were members of the ancient patriarchal 
family, we will trace such a family for a couple of genera- 
tions from the original founder. Suppose, then, the original 
founder married, and with several children, both sons and 
daughters. All the sons would continue members of this 
family. The daughters would only continue members until 



142 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

they married, when they would cease to be members of the 
family of their birth, and become members of their respec- 
tive husbands' families. So when the sons of the founder 
married, their wives would become members of the family ; 
and such of their children as were sons would be members, 
and such as were daughters would be members only until 
they married; and so on through succeeding generations. 
On the founder's death he would be succeeded as patriarch 
by his eldest son. On the eldest son's death, he would be 
succeeded by his eldest son, if he had a son ; and if not, 
then by his next brother. The patriarchal family also 
included in its circle, in later times at all events, slaves and 
other people, who, although perhaps not really relations at 
all, were adopted into the household, assumed the family 
name, and were looked upon for all purposes as if its actual 
members. This little group of individuals seems originally 
to have existed entirely independent of any external 
authority. It supported itself by its own industry, and 
recognized no other law or authority than its own. The 
one source of authority within this little state was the 
patriarch, who was originally regarded, not only as the owner 
of all the property of which the family was possessed, but 
also as having unlimited power over the different individuals 
of which it was composed. All the members lived together 
under the same roof, or within the same enclosure. No 
member could say that any single thing was his own 
property. Everything belonged to the family, and every 
member was responsible to the patriarch for his actions. 
Originally the power of the patriarch may have been 
almost absolute over the other members of the 
^ s on J family, but it must very early have become 
modified and controlled by the growth of various 
customs. Indeed, in trying to picture to ourselves these 



CUSTOM AND LA W. 143 

early times, when as yet no regular notions of law had 
arisen, it is important to remember how great a force is 
possessed by custom. Even now, when we distinguish 
pretty clearly between law and custom, we still feel the 
great coercive and restraining powers of the latter in all the 
affairs of life. But when no exact notions of law had been 
formed, it seemed an almost irresistible argument in favour 
of a particular action that it had always been performed 
before. There would thus spring up in a household certain 
rules of conduct for the different members, certain fixed 
limits to their respective family duties. Before any indi- 
vidual would be commanded by the patriarch to do any 
particular duty, it would come to be inquired whether it 
was customary for such a duty to be assigned to such an 
individual. Before the patriarch inflicted any punishment 
on a member of the family, it would come to be inquired 
whether and in what manner it had been customary to 
punish the particular act complained of. Many things 
would tend to increase this regard for custom. The 
obvious advantages resulting from regularity and certainty 
in the ordering of the* family life would soon be felt, and 
thus a public opinion in favour of custom would be created. 
Ancestor-worship, too, which plays so conspicuous a part in 
early Aryan civilization, acted, no doubt, as a powerful 
strengthener of the force of custom, as is indicated by the 
fact that in many nations the traditionary originator of their 
laws is some powerful ancestor to whom the nation is 
accustomed to pay an especial reverence. 

Resulting from this development of custom into law in 
the early family life of the Aryans, we find that special 
duties soon became assigned to persons occupying particular 
positions. To the young men of the household were 
assigned the more active outdoor employments ; to the 



144 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

maidens the milking of the cows ; to the elder women other 
household duties. And the importance of knowing what 
the customs were also gave rise to the family council, or 
' sabha/ as it is called in Sanskrit, which consisted of the 
elders of the family, the ' sabhocita,' presided over by the 
1 sabhapati,' or president of the assembly. The importance 
attached to the decisions of this council was so great, that 
the 'sabya,' or decrees of the 'sabha,' came to be used 
simply to express law or custom. It is probable^ therefore 
that this assembly regulated to a great extent the customs 
and laws of the family in its internal management, and 
also superintended any negotiations carried on with other 
families. 

To complete our picture of the patriarchal family, we have 
the traditions of three distinct customs or rites affecting its in- 
ternal economy. Two of these rites, the mainte- 
e fi ouse " nance of the sacred house-fire, and the marriage 
ceremony, probably date back to a very remote 
period ; and the third, the custom of adoption, though of 
later development, may be regarded, in its origin at least, 
as primitive. Fire is itself so wonderful in its appearance 
and effects, so good a servant, so terrible a master, that we 
cannot feel any surprise at its having attracted a great deal 
of attention in early times. The traces of fire-worship are 
so widely spread over the earth that there is scarcely a 
single race whose traditions are entirely devoid of them. 
But the sacred house-fire of the Aryans is interesting to 
us chiefly in its connection with other family rites in which 
it played an important part. This fire, which was per- 
petually kept burning on the family hearth, seems to have 
been regarded in some sort, as a living family deity, who 
watched over and assisted the particular family to which it 
belonged. It was by its aid that the food of the family was 



MARRIAGE. 145 



cooked, and from it was ignited the sacrifice or the funeral 
pyre. It was the centre of the family life ; the hearth on 
which it burned was in the midst of the dwelling, and no 
stranger was admitted into its presence. That hearth was 
to each member of the household as it were an umbilicus 
orbis, or navel of the earth — hearth, only another form of 
earth. 1 When the members of the family met together to 
partake of their meals, a part was always first offered to the 
fire by whose aid the meal was prepared ; the patriarch acted 
as officiating priest in this as in every other family cere- 
mony ; and to the patriarch's wife was confided the especial 
charge of keeping the fire supplied with fuel. 

By marriage, as we have seen, a woman became a member 
of her husband's family. She ceased to be any longer a 

member of the household in which she was 

1 /- 1 i-r /- 1 /- -i -ii Marriage. 

born, for the life of each family was so isolated 

that it would have been impossible to belong to two 

different families at once. So we find that the marriage 

ceremony chiefly consisted in an expression of this change 

of family by the wife. In general it was preceded by a 

treaty between the two 'families, a formal offer of marriage 

made by the intending husband's family on his behalf, 

together with a gift to the bride's family, which was regarded 

as the price paid for the bride. If all preliminary matters 

went forward favourably, then, on the day fixed for the 

marriage, the different members of the bridegroom's family 

went to the household of the bride and demanded her. 

After some orthodox delay, in which the bride was expected 

to express unwillingness to go, she was formally given up to 

those who demanded her, the patriarch of her household 

solemnly dismissing her from it and giving up all authority 

over her. She was then borne in triumph to the bride- 

1 See above, page 94. 

I. 



146 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

groom's house ; and, on entering it, was carried over the 
threshold, so as not to touch it with her feet ; thus express- 
ing that her entry within the house was not that of a mere 
guest or stranger. She was finally, before the house-fire, 
solemnly admitted into her husband's family, and as a 
worshipper at the family altar. 

This ceremony was subject to a great many variations 
amongst the different Aryan races ; but in every one of them 
some trace of it is to be found, and this always 
p "" apparently intended to express the same idea, 
the change of the bride's family. Adoption, which in later 
times became extremely common among the Romans — the 
race which seems in Europe to have preserved most faith- 
fully the old Aryan family type — originated in a sort of 
extension of the same theory that admitted of the wife's 
entry into her husband's family, as almost all the details of 
the ceremony of adoption are copied from that of marriage. 
Cases must have occurred pretty often where a man might 
be placed in such a position as to be without a family. He 
may have become alienated from his own kindred by the 
commission of some crime, or all his relatives may have died 
from natural causes or been killed in war. In the condition 
in which society was then, such a man would be in a 
peculiarly unenviable position. There would be no one in 
whom he could trust, no one who would be the least in- 
terested in him or bound to protect him. Thus wandering 
as an outlaw, without means of defence from enemies, and 
unable to protect his possessions if he chanced to have any, 
or to obtain means of subsistence if he had none, he would 
be very desirous of becoming a member of some other 
family, in order that he might find in it the assistance and 
support necessary for his own welfare. It might also some- 
times happen, that owing to a want of male descendants 



ADOPTION. 147 



\° 



some house might be in danger of extinction. Now the 
extinction of a family was a matter of peculiar dread to its 
members. Connected with the worship of the hearth was 
the worship of the ancestors of the family./ It was the duty 
of each patriarch to offer sacrifices on stated occasions to 
the departed spirits of his ancestors ; and it was considered 
as a matter of the utmost importance that these sacrifices 
should be kept up, in order to insure the happiness of those 
departed spirits after death. So important indeed was this 
rite held to be, that it was reckoned as one of the chief 
duties which each patriarch had to perforin, and the family 
property was regarded as dedicated to this object in priority 
to every other. It would therefore be the chief care of each 
head of a household to leave male descendants, in order 
that the offerings for his own and his ancestors' benefit might 
be continued after his death. The only person, however, 
capable of performing these rites was a member of the same 
family, one who joined in the same worship by the same 
household fire : so if all the males of a family were to die 
out, these rights must of, necessity cease. 

The marriage ceremony had already supplied a prece- 
dent for introducing members into a house who were not 
born in it. It was very natural, then, that this principle 
should be extended to the introduction of males when there 
was any danger of the male line becoming extinct. This 
was done by the ceremony of adoption, which was in many 
respects similar to that of marriage, being a formal renuncia- 
tion of the person adopted by the patriarch of his original 
family, in case he was a member of one, and a formal 
acceptance and admission into the new family of his adop- 
tion, of which he was thenceforward regarded as a regular 
member. This ceremony exhibits in a very marked manner 
the leading peculiarity of the patriarchal household. Ws 



148 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

see how completely isolated, in theory, such a group was 
from the rest of the world ; having its own distinct worship, 
in which no one but its own members were permitted to 
share, reverencing its own ancestors only, who might receive 
worship from none but their descendants. So jealously was 
this separation of families guarded, that it was impossible for 
a man or woman at the same time to worship at two family 
shrines. While displaying its isolation in the strongest 
light, adoption is nevertheless a mark of decay in the patri- 
archal family. It is an artificial grafting on the original 
simple stock; and however carefully men may have shut 
their eyes at first to its artificial nature, it must have had a 
gradual tendency to undermine the reverence paid to the 
principle of blood relationship. 

Before we consider, however, the causes of decay of this 
form of society, which we shall do in the next chapter, there 
are some other indications of their manner of livelihood 
which will help us to understand the social condition of 
these Aryan patriarchal families. We have seen that, with 
the introduction of bronze into Europe, various changes took 
place in the manner of men's lives. One of these is the 
regular domestication of animals. It is true that domestic 
animals were by no means unknown before the bronze age 
in Europe : but until that time this custom had not attained 
any great extension. In remains of settlements whose age 
is supposed to be before the introduction of bronze, by far 
the larger number of animals' bones found are those be- 
longing to wild species, while those belonging to tame species 
are comparatively rare. This shows that the principal part 
of the food of those people who lived before the bronze age 
was obtained by hunting. After the introduction of bronze, 
however, exactly the reverse is the case. In these later 
remains the bones of domestic animals become much more 



INTRODUCTION OF THE PASTORAL LIFE. 149 

common, while those of wild animals are comparatively 
rare, which shows what an important revolution had taken 
place in men's habits. 

It must also be remembered that many remains supposed 
to belong to the later stone age may, in fact, belong to 
societies that existed during the bronze age, but introduc- 
who had not yet adopted the use of bronze, or tion of the 
else from their situation were unable to obtain pastoral life, 
any. As yet so little is known of how this metal was 
obtained at that time, that it is impossible to say what 
situations would be least favourable for obtaining it ; but 
considering that tin, of which bronze is partly composed, 
is only found in a very few places, the wonder is rather 
that bronze weapons are so frequent amongst ,the different 
remains scattered over Europe, than that they should be 
absent from some of them. Moreover, the races that in- 
habited Europe before the Aryans came there would after- 
wards remain collected together in settlements, surrounded 
by the invading population, for a considerable length of 
time before they had either been exterminated or absorbed 
by the more civilized race. These aborigines would adopt 
such of the arts and customs of the Aryans as were most 
within their reach. The increased population and the 
greater cultivation of the land which followed the Aryan 
invasion would make it more difficult to obtain food from 
hunting, and the aborigines would therefore be compelled 
to adopt domestication of animals as a means of support^ 
which they would have little difficulty in doing, as they 
would be able to obtain a stock to start from, either by raids 
on their neighbours' herds or, perhaps, by barter. But the 
manufacture of bronze weapons, being a much more com- 
plicated affair than the rearing of cattle, would take a much 
longer time to acquire. This perhaps may account for the 



150 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

remains found in the lake-dwellings, some of which show a 
considerable degree of social advance, but an entire ignor- 
ance of the use of bronze, while in the later ones bronze 
weapons are also found. We may, then, regard the domesti- 
cation of animals, to the extent that it was practised by 
the Aryans in their Asiatic home, as a new thing in Europe, 
and as introduced by the Aryans. It was on their flocks 
and herds that these races chiefly depended for subsistence, 
and the importance of the chase as a means of livelihood was 
very much less with them than it was with the old hunter- 
tribes that formed the earlier population of Europe. This 
in itself was a great advance in civilization. It implied a 
regular industry, and the possession of cattle was not only 
a guarantee against want, but an inducement to a more 
regular and orderly mode of living. 

There are no lessons so important to uncivilized nations 
as those of providence and industry, and the pastoral life 
required and encouraged both these qualities. It was 
necessary to store up at one time of year food to support 
the cattle during another period; to preserve a sufficient 
number of animals to keep the stock replenished. The 
cows too had to be milked at regular times, and every night 
the flocks and herds had to be collected into pens to 
protect them from beasts of prey, and every morning to 
be led out again to the pasture. All this shows the exist- 
ence of a more organized and methodical life than is 
possible to a hunter-tribe. The pastoral life, moreover, 
seems to be one particularly suited to the patriarchal type 
of society. Each little community is capable of supplying 
its own wants, and is also compelled to maintain a certain 
degree of isolation. The necessity of having a considerable 
extent of country for their pasturage would prevent different 
families from living very near each other. In its simplest 



COMMERCE. 151 



state, too, the pastoral life is a nomadic one ; so that the 
only social connection which can exist among such a people 
is one of kinship, for having no fixed homes they can 
have no settled neighbours or fellow-countrymen. The 
importance attached to cattle in this stage of civilization is 
evidenced by the frequent use of words in their origin 
relating to cattle, in all the Aryan languages, to express 
many of the ordinary incidents of life. Not only do cattle 
occupy a prominent place in Aryan mythology, but titles of 
honour, the names for divisions of the day, for the divisions 
of land, for property, for money, and many other words, all 
attest by their derivation how prominent a position cattle 
occupied with the early Aryans. The patriarch is called in 
Sanskrit 'lord of the cattle,' the morning is 'the calling of 
the cattle,' the evening 'the milking time.' The Latin 
word for money, pecunia, and our English word ' fee ' both 
come from the Aryan name for cattle. In Anglo-Saxon 
movable property is called 'cwicfeoh,' or living cattle, 
while immovable property, such as houses and land, is 
called ' dead cattle.' And so we find the same word con- 
stantly cropping up in all the Aryan languages, to remind 
us that in the pastoral life cattle are the great interest and 
source of wealth to the community, and the principal 
means of exchange employed in such commerce as is there 
carried on. 

The commerce between different tribes or families seems 
to have been conducted at certain meeting-places agreed 

upon, and which were situated in the boundary- _ 

r ' . J Commerce, 

land or neutral territory between the different 

settlements. Very frequently at war with each other, or at 

best only preserving an armed and watchful quiet, — each 

side ready at a moment's notice to seize on a favourable 

opportunity for the commencement of active hostilities,— 



152 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

continual friendly intercourse was impossible. So that 
when they wished for their mutual advantage to enter into 
amicable relations, it was necessary to establish some sort 
of special agreement for that purpose. It is probable, then, 
that when they found the advantages which could be 
derived from commercial exchanges, certain places were 
agreed upon as neutral territory where these exchanges 
might take place. Such places of exchange would naturally 
be fixed upon as would be equally convenient to both 
parties ; and their mutual jealousy would prevent one tribe 
from permitting the free entrance within its own limits of 
members of other tribes. Places, too, would be chosen so 
as to be within reach of three or four different tribes ; and 
thus the place of exchange, the market-place, would be 
fixed in that border-land to which no tribe laid any special 
claim. So we see that to commerce was due the first 
amicable relations of one tribe with another; and perhaps 
our market crosses may owe their origin to some remains of 
the old ideas associated with assemblies where men first 
learnt to look upon men of different tribes as brothers in a 
common humanity. 

It took a long time, however, to mitigate that feeling of 
hostility which seems to have existed in early times between 
different communities. Even when they condescended to 
barter with each other they did not forget the difference 
between the friend and the foe. In the Senchus Mor, a 
book compiled by the old Irish or ' Brehon ' lawyers, this 
difference between dealing with a friend and a stranger is 
rather curiously indicated in considering the rent of land. 
' The three rents,' says the Great Book of the Law, as it is 
called, ' are rack rent (or the extreme rent) from a person 
of a strange tribe, a fair rent from one of the tribe (that is 
one's own tribe), and the stipulated rent, which is paid 



COMMERCE. 153 



equally by the tribe and the strange tribe.' Such a distinction 
is generally recognized in all early communities. In dealing 
with a man of his own tribe, the individual was held bound 
in honour not to take any unfair advantage, to take only 
such a price, to exact only such a value in exchange, as he 
was legitimately entitled to. It was quite otherwise, how- 
ever, in dealings with members of other tribes. Then the 
highest value possible might justly be obtained for any 
article; so that dealings at markets which consisted of 
exchanges between different tribes, came to mean a par- 
ticular sort of trading, where the highest price possible was 
obtained for anything sold. It is probable that this cast, to 
a certain extent, a slur upon those who habitually devoted 
themselves to this kind of trading. Though it was recog- 
nized as just to exact as high a price as possible from the 
stranger, still the person who did so was looked upon to a 
certain extent as guilty of a disreputable action ; viewed, in 
fact, much in the same light as usurious money-lenders are 
viewed nowadays. They were people who did not offend 
against the laws of their times, but who sailed so near the 
wind as to be tainted, as it were, with fraud. Indeed, our 
word 'monger,' which simply means 'dealer,' comes from a 
root which, in Sanskrit, means ' to deceive ; ' so commerce and 
cheating seem to have been early united, and we must 
therefore not be surprised if they are not entirely divorced 
even in our own time. 

Now 'mark,' which, as we know, means a boundary or 
border-land, comes from a root which means ' the chase,' 
or ' wild animals.' So ' mark ' originally meant the place of 
the chase, or where wild animals lived. This gives us some 
sort of picture of these early settlements, whose in-dwellers 
carried on their commerce with each other in such primitive 
fashion. They were little spots of cleared or cultivated 



i§4 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

land, surrounded by a sort of jungle or primeval forest 
inhabited only by wild beasts. It was in such wild places 
as these that the first markets used to be held. Here, under 
the spreading branches of the trees, at some spot agreed 
upon beforehand, — some open glade, perhaps, which would 
be chosen because a neighbouring stream afforded means of 
refreshment, — the fierce distrustful men would meet to take 
a passing glimpse at the blessings of peace. These wild 
border-lands which intervened also explain to us how it 
was that so great an isolation continued to be maintained 
between the different settlements. If their pasture-lands 
had abutted immediately on each other, if the herds of one 
tribe had grazed by the herds of another, there must have 
been much more intercommunion and mutual trust than 
appears to have existed. 

The value of cattle does not consist only in the food and 
skins which they provide. Oxen have from a very early 
time been employed for purposes of agriculture; and we 
find among the names derived from cattle many suggesting 
that they must have been put to this use at the time when 
those names arose. Thus the Greeks spoke of the evening 
as fiovXvros (boulutos), or the time for the unyoking of 
oxen; and the same idea is expressed in the old German 
word for evening, ' abant ' (Abend), or the unyoking. This, 
then, is the next stage in social progress : when agriculture 
becomes the usual employment of man. With the advance 
of this stage begins the decay of the patriarchal life, which, 
as we shall see in the next chapter, gradually disappears and 
gives place to fresh social combinations. Though we have 
hitherto spoken only of the patriarchal life of the Aryans, 
it was a life even more characteristic of the Semitic race. 
They were essentially pastoral and nomadic in their habits, 
and they seem to have continued to lead a purely pastoral 



COMMERCE. 155 



life much longer than the Aryans did. In the Old Testa- 
ment we learn how Abraham and Lot had to separate 
because their flocks were too extensive to feed together ; 
and how Abraham wandered about with his flocks and 
herds, his family and servants, dwellers in tents, leading a 
simple patriarchal life, much as do the Arabs of the present 
day. Long after the neighbouring people had settled in 
towns, these Semitic tribes continued to wander over the 
intervening plains, depending for food and clothing only on 
their sheep and cattle and camels. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY. 

So long as people continued to lead a wandering shepherd 
life, the institution of the patriarchal family afforded a suffi- 
cient and satisfactory basis for such cordial union 
6 Tit as was P ossu: >l e - It was a condition of society 
' in which the relations of the different members 
to each other were extremely simple and confined within 
very narrow boundaries ; but these habits of life prevented 
the existence of any very complicated social order, and at 
the same time gave a peculiar force and endurance to those 
customs and ties which did exist. For while the different 
tribes had no settled dwelling-places, the only cohesion 
possible was that produced by the personal relations of the 
different members one to another. Those beyond the limits 
of the tribe or household could have no permanent con- 
nection with it. They were simply ' strangers/ friends or 
enemies, as circumstances might determine, but having no 
common interests, connected by no abiding link, with those 
who were not members of the same community. When a 
family became so numerous that it was necessary for its 
members to separate, the new family, formed under the 
influence of this pressure, would at first remember the parent 
stock with reverence, and perhaps regard the patriarch of the 



THE AGRICULTURAL LIFE. 157 

elder branch as entitled to some sort of obedience from, 
and possessing some indefinite kind of power over, it after 
separation. It would, however, soon wander away and lose 
all connection with its relatives, forgetting perhaps in the 
course of time whence it had sprung, or inventing a pedigree 
more pleasing to the vanity of its members. But when 
men began to learn to till the soil, by degrees they had to 
abandon their nomadic life, and to have for a time fixed 
dwelling-places, in order that they might guard their crops, 
and gather, in the time of harvest, the fruits of their labour. 
Cattle were no longer the only means of subsistence, nor 
sufficiency of pasture the only limit to migration. A part 
of their wealth was, for a time, bound up in the land which 
they had tilled and sowed, and to obtain that wealth they 
must remain in the neighbourhood of the cultivated soil. 
Thus a new relationship arose between different families. 
They began to have neighbours — dwellers on and cultivators 
of the land bordering their own, — so that common interests 
sprang up between those who hitherto had nothing in com- 
mon, new ties began to connect together those who had 
formerly no fixed relationship. 

The adoption of agriculture changed likewise the relation 
of men to the land on which they dwelt. Hitherto the 
tracts of pasture over which the herdsman had driven his 
flocks and cattle had been as unappropriated as the open 
sea, as free as the air which he breathed. He neither 
claimed any property in the land himself, nor acknowledged 
any title thereto in another. He had spent no labour on 
it, had done nothing to improve its fertility \ and his only 
right as against others to any locality was that of his 
temporary sojourn there. But when agriculture began to 
require the expenditure of labour on the land, and its 
enclosure, so as to protect the crops which had been sown, 



158 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

anew distinct idea of the possession of these enclosed pieces 
of land began to arise, so that a man was no longer simply 
the member of a particular family. He had acquired new 
rights and attributes, for which the patriarchal economy had 
made no provision. He was the inhabitant of a particular 
locality, the owner and cultivator of a particular piece of 
land. The effect of this change was necessarily to weaken 
the household tie which bound men together, by introducing 
new relations between them. The great strength of that 
early bond had consisted in its being the only one which 
the state of society rendered possible; and its force was 
greatly augmented by the isolation in which the different 
nomadic groups habitually lived. The adoption of a more 
permanent settlement thus tended in two ways to facilitate 
the introduction of a new social organization. By increasing 
the intercourse, and rendering more permanent the con- 
nection between different families, it destroyed their isola- 
tion, and therefore weakened the autocratic power of their 
chiefs ; and at the same time, by introducing new interests 
into the life of the members of a family, and new relations 
between different families, it compelled sometimes the 
adoption of regulations necessarily opposed to the principles 
of patriarchal rule. We must remember, however, that the 
change from a nomadic to a settled state took place very 
gradually, some peoples being influenced by it much more 
slowly than others. Agriculture may be practised to a 
certain extent by those who lead a more or less wandering 
life, as is the case with the Tartar tribes, who grow buck- 
wheat, which only takes two or three months for its 
production ; so that at the end of that time they are able to 
gather their harvest and once more wander in search of new 
pastures. And it is from its use by them that this grain has 
received in French the name of Me sarrasin (Saracen corn) 



THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY. 159 

. 

or simply sarrasin. We may suppose that the earliest 
agriculture practised was something of this rude description ; 
and even when tribes learnt the advantage of cultivating 
more slowly germinating crops, they would not readily 
abandon their nomadic habits, which long continuance 
had rendered dear to them ; but would only become agricul- 
turists under the pressure of circumstances. The hunter 
tribes of North American Indians, and the Gipsies of 
Europe, serve to show us how deeply rooted in a people 
may become the love of wandering and the dislike to settled 
industry. 

It was probably to the difficulty of supporting existence 
produced by the increase of population that the more con- 
tinuous pursuit of agriculture was due ; and it 
would therefore be first regularly followed by e ™ a ^ e 
the less warlike tribes, whose territory had been 
curtailed by the incursions of their bolder neighbours. No 
longer able to seek pasture over so extended an area as 
formerly, and with perhaps an increasing population, they 
would find the necessity of obtaining from the land a 
greater proportionate supply of subsistence than they had 
obtained hitherto. Agriculture would therefore have to be 
pursued more regularly and laboriously, and thus the habit 
of settlement would gradually be acquired. Under this 
influence we may discern a change taking place in the social 
state of the Aryan tribes. Gradually they become less 
nomadic and more agricultural; and as this takes place, 
there arises also a change in the relations of peoples to each 
other. We should naturally expect considerable variety in 
the effects produced on different nations by the adoption 
of a settled life. The results depend upon climate and 
locality, upon the kind of civilization chosen, and the special 
idiosyncrasies of the people who adopt it. All these 



160 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

elements had their share in moulding the life of the Aryans 
when they became an agricultural people. Yet we find, 
nevertheless, one special type of society to have been the 
prevailing type among them. This form of society is called 
the Village Community. It possesses some features appa- 
rently so peculiarly its own, that it would be difficult to decide 
on the cause of its adoption or growth. It will be safer with 
our present limited knowledge to be satisfied with noting 
the more marked characteristics of this form of society, and 
the localities in which it may be traced ; and not attempt to 
determine whether it is to be regarded as a natural resultant 
of the settlement of patriarchal families, or as inherited or 
evolved by some particular groups of tribes. 

The village community in its simplest state consisted of a 
group of families, or households, whose dwellings were gene- 
rally collected together within an enclosure. To this group 
belonged a certain tract of land, the cultivation and pro- 
prietorship of which were the subject of minute regulations. 
The regulations varied in different localities to a certain 
extent, but they were based on the division of the land into 
three principal parts, viz. (i) the land immediately in the 
neighbourhood of the dwellings, (2) another part specially 
set aside for agricultural purposes, and (3) the remaining 
portion of the surrounding open country, which was used 
only for grazing. Each of these divisions was regarded as 
in some sort the common property of the village ; but 
the rights of individuals in some of them were more ex- 
tensive than in others. That part of the land which was 
annexed especially to the dwellings was more completely 
the property of the different inhabitants than any other. 
Each head of a house was entitled to the particular plot 
attached to his dwelling, and probably these plots, and the 
dwellings to which they were annexed, remained always 



THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY. 161 

practically in the ownership of the same family. The area 
of this section, however, was very insignificant when com- 
pared with the remainder of the communal estate. In this the 
arable land was divided into a number of small plots, each 
or several of which were assigned to particular households. 
The mode of division was very various ; but generally speak- 
ing, either each household had an equal share assigned to 
it, or else a share in proportion to the number of its males. 
Redistributions of the shares took place either at stated 
periods, or whenever circumstances had rendered the ex- 
isting division inequitable. Each household cultivated the 
particular share assigned to it, and appropriated to its own 
use the crops produced ; but individuals were never allowed 
themselves to settle the mode of cultivation that they might 
prefer. The crops to be sown, and the part of land on 
which they were to be sown, were all regulated by the 
common assembly of the whole village, as were also 
the times for sowing and for harvest, and every other 
agricultural operation; and these laws of the assembly 
had to be implicitly followed by all the villagers. The 
third portion, open or common land of the village, was 
not divided between the households at all ; but every 
member of the community was at liberty to pasture his 
flocks and herds upon it. 

In their relations to each other the villagers seem to have 
been on a footing of perfect equality. It is probable that 
there existed generally some sort of chief, but his power 
does not appear to have been very great, and for the most 
part he was merely a president of their assemblies, 
exercising only an influence in proportion to his personal 
qualifications. The real lawgivers and rulers of this society 
were, the different individuals who constituted the assembly. 
These, however, did not comprise all the inhabitants of 

M 



162 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

the village. Only the heads of the different families were 
properly included in the village assembly. But the house- 
hold had no longer the same extended circle as formerly, 
and, so far as we can gather, there seems to have been little 
check on the division of families and the formation of new 
households. 

It must be borne in mind, however, that we have no 
existing institution exactly resembling the village community, 
such as we may suppose it to have originally been. As with 
the patriarchal family, we meet with it only after it has 
undergone considerable modification, and we have to recon- 
struct it from such modified forms and traditions as remain 
to us. Many minor details of its nature are therefore 
necessarily matters of speculation. The community, how- 
ever, may still be found in a changed form in several 
localities ; notably among the peasantry in Russia, where it 
bears the name of the mir, and among the native population 
of India. Its former existence among the Teuton tribes is 
attested by the clearest evidence. With each of these 
peoples, however, the form is somewhat varied from what 
we may conclude to have been its original nature ; in each 
country it has been subject not only to the natural growth 
and development which every institution is liable to, but to 
special influences arising from the events connected with 
the nation's history, and from the nature and extent of its 
territory. But before we inquire what these different in- 
fluences may have been, let us notice first certain leading 
characteristics of this group, and consider how they probably 
arose. 

The first thing that we notice is the change in the source 
of authority in the Village Community as compared with 
that which existed in the patriarchal family. The ruling 
power is no longer placed in the hands of an individual 



THE ASSEMBLY OF HOUSEHOLDERS. 163 

chief, but is vested in an assembly of all the householders. 
The second marked peculiarity is the common possession 
of nearly all the land by the village, combined The as _ 
with the individual possession of goods of a sembly of 
movable nature by the different members. house- 
These may be said to be the two essentials of holders - 
a true village community. Now the change from the patri- 
archal to this later social form may have taken place by 
either of two processes — the extension of an individual 
family into a community, or the amalgamation of various 
families. Probably both of these processes took place ; but 
wherever anything like the formation of a village community 
has been actually observed, and the process has occasionally 
been discernible even in modern times in India, it is due to 
the former of the two causes indicated. This mode of 
formation also appears to have left the most distinct impress 
on society, and we will therefore notice first how it probably 
acted. 

When a family had devoted itself to agricultural pursuits, 
and settled in a fixed locality, one of those divisions of its 
members might take place which probably were of frequent 
occurrence in the nomadic state. Although theoretically we 
speak of the patriarchal family as united and indivisible, 
yet as a matter of fact we know that it could not always 
have been so, and that families must frequently have either 
split up, or else sent off little colonies from their midst. 
Now, we have seen how marked an effect the settlement 
of the family must have had in preserving a permanent 
connection between that family and the households which 
sprang out of it. The separation between the older and the 
younger households would be by no means so complete as 
formerly. The subsidiary family would continue in close 
intercourse with the elder branch, and would enjoy with it 



164 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



the use of the land which had been appropriated. In course 
of time it might happen that a whole group of families would 
thus become settled near each other, all united by a common 
origin and enjoying in common the land surrounding the 
settlement. The desire for mutual protection, which would 
often be felt, would alone be a strong inducement to preserve 
the neighbourhood between those who through kinship were 
allies by nature and tradition. Thus, though each separate 
family would continue in its internal relations the pecu- 
liarities of the patriarchal rule, the heads of the different 
families would be related to each other by quite a new tie. 
They would not be members of one great family all 
subservient to a common chief. They would be united 
simply by the bond of their common interests. 

In this way, no doubt, sprang up a new relationship 
between the family chiefs, a relationship not provided for in 
the construction of the patriarchal family. We might expect 
perhaps that a special pre-eminence would be accorded to 
the original family from which the others had separated, 
and possibly some traces of this pre-eminence may here and 
there be discovered. Why we have not more traces of it 
may be difficult to explain. For upon the whole the 
relationship among the different heads of households seems 
generally to be one of equality. As we do not know exactly 
by what process families became divided, it is useless to 
speculate how this equality arose. Alongside of this new 
reign of equality among the different patriarchs or heads of 
households, went a decrease in the power of the patriarch 
within his own circle. The family had ceased to be the 
bond of union of the community at large, albeit the units 
composing the new combination were themselves groups 
constructed on the patriarchal type; so that the fact that 
they were now only parts of larger groups had the efiect of 



THE ASSEMBLY OF HOUSEHOLDERS. 165 

weakening the force of patriarchal customs. When the 
household was the only state of which an individual was a 
member, to leave it was to lose all share in its rights and 
property, to become an outlaw in every possible sense. 
But when the family became part of the village, the facilities 
for separating from it were necessarily increased. House- 
holds would more readily subdivide, now that after separa- 
tion their component parts continued united in the 
community. Thus by degrees the old patriarchal life 
decayed, and gave place to this new and more elastic social 
formation. The importance of an individual's relation to 
the family became less, that of the family to the community 
became greater; so that in time the community took to 
itself the regulation of many affairs originally within the 
exclusive power of the patriarch. 

With these changes in social life came new theories of 
rights and obligations. A new lesson was learnt with regard 
to property. It is difficult to discern whether, in the older, 
the patriarchal society, the property was regarded as ex- 
clusively that of the chief, or as belonging to the family 
collectively. The truth seems to be that the two ideas were 
blended, and neither was conceived with any clearness or 
completeness. In the village community for the first time 
the two forms of property, personal and communal, became 
fully distinguished ; each kind, by defining and limiting, pro- 
ducing a clearer idea of the other. The land, the bond of 
union, and the limit of the extent of the community, remained 
the common property of all ; in part, no doubt, because the 
idea of possessing land was still so new that it had not been 
thoroughly grasped. The produce of the land, whether corn 
or pasture, was, on the other hand, rather regarded as a 
proper subject of private possession. At first, perhaps, in 
obedience to the habits of an earlier life, even this may 



166 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

f- . 

have been looked upon as common property. But it did 
not long continue so, as the separation of the households 
remained too complete to permit of any community with 
regard to the possessions of the individual homestead, or of 
the produce required for the support of each household ; and 
this enforced separation of household goods soon extended 
to the live stock, and to the produce of the harvest. 1 

The effects produced by their new relation to each other 
upon the individual members of this group were very im- 
portant. Hitherto such idea of law as existed 
was confined to the mandates or. traditional 
regulations of the patriarchs. Law was at first inseparably 
connected with religion. It was looked upon as a series 
of regulations handed down by some ancestor who had 
received the regulations by Divine inspiration. This notion 
of the origin of law is so general, that it is to be met with 
in the traditions of almost every nation. Thus we find the 
Egyptians reputing their laws to the teachings of Hermes 
(Thoth) ; while the lawgivers of Greece, Minos and Lycur- 
gus, are inspired, the one by Zeus the other by Apollo. So 
too the Iranian lawgiver Zoroaster is taught by the Good 
Spirit ; and Moses receives the commandments on Mount 
Sinai. Now, though this idea of law is favourable to the 
procuring obedience to it, it produces an injurious effect on 
the law itself, by rendering it too fixed and unalterable. 
Law, in order to satisfy the requirements and changes of 
life, should be elastic and capable of adaptation ; otherwise, 
regulations which in their institution were beneficial will 

1 Cattle were probably originally communal property : and were ap- 
propriated to individuals at a later stage than other movable goods. 
In the Roman law we find that they could only be transferred by the 
same forms as were required for the conveyance of land : being classed 
amongst the ' res mancipi,' 



LA W. 167 

survive to be obnoxious under an altered condition of 
society. But so long as laws are regarded as Divine com- 
mands they necessarily retain a great degree of rigidity. 
The village community, in disconnecting the source of law 
from the patriarchal power, tended to destroy this associa- 
tion. The authority of the patriarch was a part of the 
religion of the early Aryans ; he was at once the ruler and 
the priest of his family ; and though this union between 
the two characters long continued to have great influence 
on the conception of law, the first efforts at a distinction 
between Divine and human commands sprang from the 
regulations adopted by the assembly of the village. The 
complete equality and the joint authority exercised by its 
members was an education in self-government, which was 
needed to enable them to advance in the path of civiliza- 
tion, teaching them the importance of self-dependence and 
individual responsibility. 

Those who learnt that lesson best displayed in their 
history the greatness of its influence, having gained from it 
a vigour and readiness to meet and adapt themselves to 
new requirements such as was never possessed by those 
absolute monarchies which sprang out of an enlarged form 
of the principle of patriarchal government. The history 
of the various states which arose in Asia, each in its turn 
to be overwhelmed in a destruction which scarcely left 
a trace of its social influence, exhibits in a very striking 
manner the defects which necessarily ensue when a people 
ignorant of social arts attempts to form an extensive scheme 
of government. The various races who have risen to 
temporary empire by the chances of war in the East, have 
been in very many instances nomadic tribes whose habits 
had produced a hardihood which enabled them to conquer 
with ease their effeminate neighbours of the more settled 



168 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

districts, but whose social state was not sufficiently advanced 
to allow them to carry on any extended rule. Used only 
to their simple nomadic life, they were suddenly brought 
face to face with wants and possessions of which they had 
hitherto had no experience, and which lay beyond the 
bounds of their customs or ideas. They contented them- 
selves with exacting from the conquered such tribute as 
they could extort, leaving their new subjects to manage 
their own affairs much as they had done before, till the 
conquerors, gradually corrupted by the luxuries which their 
position afforded, and having failed to make for themselves 
any firm footing in their new empire, were in their turn 
overwhelmed by fresh hordes of nomadic invaders. 

Such, indeed, may be the fate of any nation. Such was 
the fate of Rome. Her mighty empire, too, fell ; but how 
different a record has she left behind from that of the short- 
lived monarchies of the East ! Having learnt in her earliest 
infancy, better perhaps than any other nation, how to 
reconcile the conflicting theories of the household and the 
community, she never flagged in her study of the arts of 
government. Early imbued with a love of law and order, 
her people discovered in due time how to accommodate 
their rule to the various conditions of those which came 
under their sway. Her laws penetrated to the remotest 
boundaries of her state, and the rights of a Roman citizen 
were as clearly defined in Britain as in Rome itself. Thus 
the Romans have left behind them a system of law the 
wonder and admiration of all mankind, one which has left 
indelible marks on the laws and customs, the arts and 
civilization, of every country which once formed part of 
their dominions. 

Such were among the changes resulting from the adoption 
of the village community ; but their influences only gradually 



LA W. 169 

asserted themselves, and the extent of their development 
was very various among different peoples. In India, the 
religious element in the household had always a peculiar 
force, and its influence continued to affect to a great extent 
the formation of the community. There this organization 
never lost sight of the patriarchal power, and has exhibited 
a constant tendency to revert to that more primitive social 
form. Among the Slavonic tribes the community seems to 
have found its most favourable conditions, and some of the 
reasons for this are not difficult to discern. The Slavs in 
Ruseia have for a long time had open to them an immense 
tract of thinly inhabited country, their only rivals to the 
possession of which were the Finnish tribes of the north. 
Now, the village community is a form peculiarly adapted 
for colonization, and this process of colonizing fresh country 
by sending out detachments from over-grown villages seems 
to have gone on for a long time in Russia; so that the 
communities which still exist there present a complete 
network; all are bound by ties of nearer or more distant 
relationship to each other; every village having some 
1 mother-village ' from which it has sprung. 1 Having a prac- 
tically boundless territory awaiting their settlement, none 
of those difficulties in obtaining land which led to the decay 
of the village in western Europe affected the Russians in 
their earlier history. 

With the Teutons the village had a somewhat different 
history. It is difficult to determine exactly to what extent 
it existed among them ; but traces of its organization are 
still discoverable among the laws and customs of Germany 
and England. The warlike habits of the German tribes, 
however, soon produced a marked effect on this organization. 

1 The same connection between * mother' and 'daughter' villages 
also once existed to a large extent in Germany. 



!7o THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

The chief of the village, whether hereditary or elective, was 
under normal conditions possessed of but little power. 
Among a warlike people, however, the necessity for a 
captain or dictator must have been much greater than 
with peaceful tribes ; for war requires, more than any other 
pursuit, that it should be directed by an individual mind. 
Among the peaceful inhabitants of India or Russia the 
village head-man was generally some aged and venerable 
father exercising a sort of paternal influence over the others 
through the reverence paid to his age and wisdom. The 
habits of the Teutons gave an excessive importance to the 
strength and vigour of manhood, and they learnt to regard 
those who exhibited the greatest skill in battle as their 
natural chieftains. 



CHAPTER VIII 

RELIGION. 

We have hitherto been occupied in tracing the growth of 
inventions which had for their end the supply of material 
wants, or the ordering of conditions which should enable 
men to live peaceably together in communities, and defend 
the products of their labour from the attacks of rival tribes 
and warlike neighbours. A very little research into the 
relics of antiquity, however, brings another side of human 
thought before us, and we discover, whether by following 
the revelations of language or by examining into the traces 
left in ancient sites, abundant proof to show that the material 
wants of life did not alone occupy the thoughts of our remote 
ancestors any more than our own, and that even while the 
struggle for life was fiercest, conjectures about the unseen 
world and the life beyond the grave, and aspirations towards 
the invisible source of life and light they felt to be around 
them, occupied a large space in their minds. God did not 
leave them without witness at any time, but caused the 
'invisible things to be shown by those that do appear.' 
And even in the darkest ages and among the least-favoured 
races' there were always to be found some minds that 
vibrated, however feebly, to the suggestions of this teaching, 



172 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

and shaped out for themselves and their tribe some con- 
ception of a Divine Ruler and His government of the world 
from those works of His hands of which their senses told 
them. Before commerce, or writing, or law had advanced 
beyond their earliest beginnings, religious rites and funeral 
rites had no doubt been established in every tribe, and men's 
thoughts about God and His relationship to His creatures had 
found some verbal expression, some sort of creed in which 
they could be handed down from father to son and form a 
new tie to bind men together. The task of tracing back 
these rites and creeds to their earliest shape is manifestly 
harder than that of tracing material inventions, or laws be- 
tween man and man, to their first germs, for we are here 
trenching on some of the deepest questions which the human 
mind is capable of contemplating — nothing less, indeed, than 
the nature of conscience and the dealings of God Himself 
with the souls of His creatures. We must therefore tread 
cautiously, be content to leave a great deal uncertain, and, 
making up our minds only on such points as appear to be 
decided by revelation, accept on others the results of present 
researches as still imperfect, and liable to be modified as 
further light on the difficult problems in consideration is 
obtained. 

The study of language has perhaps done more than any- 
thing else to clear away the puzzles which mythologies 

Explanation f° rm erly presented to students. It has helped 
of mythology in two ways : first, by tracing the names of 

through the objects of worship to their root-forms, and thus 

stu y o showing their meaning and revealing the 

thought which lay at the root of the worship ; 

secondly, by proving the identity between the gods of 

different nations, whose names, apparently different, have 

been resolved into the same root-word, or to a root of the 



MYTHOLOGY AND LANGUAGE. 173 

same meaning, when the alchemy of philological research 
was applied to them. 

The discovery of a closer relationship than had been 
formerly suspected between the mythologies of various 
nations is a very important one, as it enables us to trace 
the growth of the stories told of gods and heroes, from the 
mature form in which we first become acquainted with 
them in the religious systems of the Greeks, Romans, and 
Scandinavians, to the primitive shape in which the same 
creeds were held by the more metaphysical and less imagi- 
native Eastern peoples among whom they originally sprang 
up. In some respects this task of tracing back the poetical 
myths of Greek and Northern poets to the simpler, if grander, 
beliefs of the ancient Egyptians or Chaldseans or Hindus 
is not unlike our search in a perfected language for its 
earliest roots. We lose shapeliness and beauty as we come 
back, but we find the form that explains the birth of the 
thought, and lets us see how it grew in the minds of men. 
One chief result arrived at by this comparison of creeds, and 
by unravelling the meaning of the names of ancient gods and 
heroes, is the discovery that a worship of different aspects 
and forces of nature lies at the bottom of nearly all mytholo- 
gies, and that the cause of the resemblance between the stories 
told of the gods and heroes (a resemblance w T hich strikes us as 
soon as we read two or three of them together) is that they 
are in reality only slightly different ways of describing natural 
appearances according to the effect produced on different 
minds, or to the variations of climate and season of the 
year. Having once got the key of the enigma in our hands, 
we soon become expert in hunting the parable through all 
the protean shapes in which it is presented to us. The 
heroes of the old stories we have long loved begin to lose 
their individuality and character for us. And instead of 



174 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

thinking of Apollo, and Osiris, and Theseus, and Herakles, 
and Thor as separate idealizations of heroic or godlike 
character; of Ariadne, and Idun, and Isis as heroines of 
pathetic histories, our thoughts as we read are busied in 
tracing all that is said about them to the aspects of the sun 
in his march across the heavens, through the vicissitudes of 
a bright and thundery eastern, or a gusty northern, day, and 
the tenderly glowing and fading colours of the western sky 
into which he sinks when his course is run. 

Our first feeling on receiving this simple explanation of 
the old stories of mythology is rather one of disappointment 
than of satisfaction ; we feel that we are losing a great deal 
— not the interest of the stories only, but all those glimpses 
of deep moral meanings, of yearnings after Divine teachers 
and rulers, of acknowledgment of the possibility of com- 
munion between God and man, which we had hitherto 
found in them, and which we are sure that the original 
makers of them could not have been without. It seems to 
rob the old religions of the essence of religion — spirituality 
— and reduce them to mere observations of natural phe- 
nomena, due rather to the bodily senses than to any in- 
stincts or necessities of the soul. But here the science of 
language, with which we were about to quarrel as having 
robbed us, comes in to restore to the old beliefs those very 
elements of mystery, awe, and yearning towards the in- 
visible, which we were fearing to see vanish away. As is 
usually the case on looking deeper, we shall find that the 
explanation which seemed at first to impoverish really 
enhances the beauty and worth of the subject brought into 
clearer light. It teaches us to see something more in what 
we have been used to call mere nature-worship than appears 
at first sight. 

When we were considering the beginnings of language, 



MYTHOLOGY AND LANGUAGE, 175 

we learned that all root-words were expressions of sensations 
received from outward things, every name or word being a 
description of some bodily feeling, a gathering-up of im- 
pressions on the senses made by the universe outside us. 
With this stock of words — pictorial words, we may call them 
— it is easy to see that when people in early times wanted 
to express a mental feeling, they were driven to use the 
word which expressed the sensation in their bodies most 
nearly corresponding to it. We do something of the same 
kind now when we talk of warm love, chill fear, hungry 
avarice, and dark revenge — mixing up words for sensations 
of the body to heighten the expression of emotions of the 
mind. In using these expressions we are conscious of 
speaking allegorical ly, and we have, over and above our 
allegorical phrases, words set aside especially for describing 
mental actions, so that we can talk of the sensations of our 
bodies and of our minds without any danger of confounding 
them together. But in early times, before words had ac- 
quired these varied and enlarged meanings, when men had 
only one word by which to express the glow of the body 
when the sun shone and the glow of the mind when a friend 
was near, the difficulty of speaking, or even thinking, of 
mental and bodily emotions apart from each other must 
have been very great. Only gradually could the two things 
have become disentangled from one another, and during all 
the time while this change was going on an allegorical way 
of speaking of mental emotions and of the source of mental 
emotions must have prevailed. It is not difficult to see 
that while love and warmth, fear and cold, had only one 
word to express them, the sun, the source of warmth, and 
God, the source of love, were spoken of in much the same 
terms, and worshipped in songs that expressed the same 
adoration and gratitude. It follows, therefore, that while 



176 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

we acknowledge the large proportion in which the nature 
element comes into all mythologies, we need not look upon 
the worshippers of nature as worshippers of visible things 
only. They felt, without being able to express, the Divine 
cause which lay behind the objects whose grandeur and 
beauty appealed to their wonder, and they loved and wor- 
shipped the Unseen while naming the seen only. As time 
passed on and language developed, losing much of its 
original significance, there was, especially among the Greeks 
and Romans, a gradual divergence between the popular 
beliefs about the gods and the spirit of true worship which 
originally lay behind them. People no longer felt the in- 
fluence of nature in the double method in which it had 
come to them in the childhood of the race, and they began 
to distinguish clearly between their bodies and their minds, 
between the things that lay without and the emotions stirred 
within. Then the old nature-beliefs became degraded to 
foolish and gross superstitions, and yearning souls sought 
God in a more spiritual way. 

The mythologies of the different Aryan nations are those 
which concern us most nearly, entering as they do into the 
very composition of our language, and colouring not only 
our literature and poetry, but our cradle-songs and the tales 
told in our nurseries. We shall find it interesting to compare 
together the various forms of the stories told by nations of the 
Aryan stock, and to trace them back to their earliest shape. 

But before entering on this task, it may be well to turn 

our attention for a little while to a still earlier mythology, 

where the mingling of metaphysical conceptions 

Egyptian ^fa fo e WO rship of natural phenomena is per- 
haps more clearly shown than in any other, and 
which may therefore serve as a guide to help us in grasping 
this connection in the more highly coloured, picturesque 



EGYPTIAN RELIGION. 177 

stones we shall be hereafter attempting to unravel. This 
earliest and least ornamented mythology is that of the 
ancient Egyptians, a people who were always disposed to 
retain primitive forms unchanged, even when, as in the 
case of their hieroglyphics, they had to use the primitive 
forms to express thoughts which these forms could not 
naturally convey. That they followed this course with their 
religious ceremonies and in their manner of representing their 
gods, is perhaps fortunate for us, as it enables us to trace with 
greater ease the particular aspect of nature, and the mental 
sensation or moral lesson identified with it, which each one 
of their gods and goddesses embodied. We have the rude 
primitive form embodying an aspect or force of nature, 
instead of a beautiful confusing story, merely for the most 
part titles, addresses, and prayers, whose purport more or 
less reveals the spiritual meaning which that aspect of 
nature conveyed to the worshipper. 

The chief objects of nature-worship must obviously be the 
same, or nearly the same, in every part of the world, so that 
even among different races, living far apart, and having no 
connection with each other, a certain similarity in the 
stories told about gods and heroes, and in the names and 
titles given to them, is observable. The sun, the moon, the 
heavens and stars, the sea, the river, sunshine and darkness, 
night and day, summer and winter, — these objects and 
changes must always make the staple, the back-bone so to 
speak, round which all mythological stories founded on 
nature-worship are grouped. But climate and scenery, 
especially any striking peculiarity in the natural features 
of a country, have a strong influence in modifying the 
impressions made by these objects on the imaginations of 
the dwellers in the land, and so giving a special form or 
colour to the national creed, bringing perhaps some Divine 

N 



178 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

attribute or some more haunting impression of the con- 
dition of the soul after death, into a prominence unknown 
elsewhere. The religion of the ancient Egyptians was 
distinguished from that of other nations by several such 
characteristics, and in endeavouring to understand them 
we must first recall what there is distinctive in the climate 
and scenery of Egypt to our minds. 

The land of Egypt is, let us remember, a wedge-shaped 

valley, broad at its northern extremity and gradually nar- 

rowing between two ranges of cliffs till it becomes 

nature in through a great part of its length a mere strip 

Egyptian of cultivatable land closely shut in on each side. 

religion. j ts s ky overhead is always blue, and from 
morning till evening intensely bright, flecked only occa- 
sionally, and here and there, by thin gauzy clouds, so that 
the sun's course, from the first upshooting of his keen 
arrowy rays over the low eastern hills to his last solemn 
sinking in a pomp of glorious colour behind the white cliffs 
in the west, can be traced unimpeded day after day through 
the entire course of the year. Beyond the cliffs which 
receive the sun's first and last greeting stretches a bound- 
less waste — the silent, dead, sunlit desert, which no one had 
ever traversed, which led no one knew where, from whose 
dread, devouring space the sun escaped triumphant each 
morning, and back into which it returned when the valley 
was left to darkness and night. 

The neighbourhood of the desert, and the striking con- 
trast between its lifeless wastes and the richly cultivated 
plains between the hills, had, as we can see, a great effect 
on the imaginations of the first inhabitants of the land of 
Egypt, and gave to many of their thoughts about death 
and the world beyond the grave an intensity unknown to 
the dwellers among less monotonous scenery. The contrast 



EGYPTIAN RELIGION. 179 

was a perpetual parable to them, or rather perhaps a 
perpetual memento mori. The valley between the cliffs 
presented a vivid picture of active and intense life, every 
inch of fruitful ground teeming with the results of labour — 
budding corn, clustering vines, groups of palm-trees, busy 
sowers and reapers and builders; resounding, too, every- 
where with brisk sounds of toil or pleasure. The clink of 
anvil and hammer, the creaking of water-wheels, the bleating 
and lowing of flocks and herds, the tramp of the oxen 
treading out the corn, the songs of women, and the 
laughter of children playing by the river. On the other 
side of the cliffs, what a change ! There reigned an un- 
broken solitude and an intense silence, such as is only 
found in the desert, because it comes from the utter absence 
of all life, animal or vegetable : no rustle of leaf or bough, no 
hum of an insect or whirr of a wing, breaks the charmed 
stillness even for a minute. There is silence, broad, un- 
broken sunshine, bare cliffs, rivers of golden sand — nothing 
else. Amenti, the ancient Egyptians called the western 
desert into which, as it seemed to them, the sun went down 
to sleep after his day's work was done ; Amenti, the vast, 
the grand, the unknown \ and it was there they built their 
most splendid places of worship, there that they carried 
their dead for burial, feeling that it spoke to them of rest, 
of unchangeableness, of eternity. 

Another striking and peculiar feature of Egyptian scenery 
was the beautiful river — the one only river — on which the 
prosperity, the very existence, of the country depended. It, 
too, had a perpetual story to tell, a parable to unfold, as it 
flowed and swelled and contracted in its beneficent yearly 
course, They saw that all growth and life depended on its 
action > where its waters reached, there followed fruitfulness 
and beauty, and a thousand teeming forms of animal, vege- 



180 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

table, and insect life ; where its furthest wave stayed, there 
the reign of nothingness and death began again. The Nile, 
therefore, became to the ancient Egyptians the token and 
emblem of a life-giving principle in nature, of that per- 
petual renewal, that passing from one form of existence into 
another, which has ever had so much hopeful significance 
for all thinking minds. Its blue colour when it reflected 
the sky was the most sacred of their emblems, and was 
devoted to funeral decorations and to the adornments of 
the dead, because it spoke to them of the victory of life 
over death, of the permanence of the life-principle amid 
the evanescent and vanishing forms under which it appeared. 
Of these two distinctive features of nature in Egypt, the 
unexplored western desert and the unending river, we must, 
then, think as exercising a modifying or intensifying effect 
on the impressions produced on the minds of ancient 
Egyptians by those aspects of nature which they had in 
common with other Eastern peoples. Let us think what 
these are. First and most conspicuous we must put the 
sun, in all his changing aspects, rising in gentle radiance 
over the eastern hills, majestically climbing the cloudless 
sky, sending down fierce perpendicular rays through all 
the hot noon, withdrawing his overwhelming heat towards 
evening as he sloped to his rest, and painting the western 
sky with colour and glory, on which the eyes of men could 
rest without being dazzled, vanishing from sight at last 
behind the white rocks in the west. And then the moon — 
white, cold, changeable, ruling the night and measuring 
time. Besides these, the planets and countless hosts of 
stars; the green earth constantly pouring forth food for 
man from its bosom ; the glowing blue sky at noon and 
the purple midnight heaven ; the moving wind ; the dark- 
ness that seemed to eat up and swallow the day. 



AMUN. 181 



Now let us see how the ancient Egyptians personified 

these into gods, and what were the corresponding moral or 

spiritual ideas of which each nature-power spake „ 

, . , „_ ,,!,-■,, , , Sun-gods, 

to their souls. We shall find the mythology 

easier to remember and understand if we group the per- 
sonifications round the natural objects whose aspects in- 
spired them, instead of enumerating them in their proper 
order as first, second, and third class divinities. So for the 
present we will class them as Sun-gods, Sky-gods, Wind- 
gods, etc. ; and we will begin with the sun, which among 
ancient Egyptians occupied the first place, given, as we 
shall see, to the sky among our Aryan ancestors. The sun, 
indeed, not only occupies the most conspicuous position in 
Egyptian mythology, but is presented to us in so many 
characters and under so many aspects that he may be said 
to be the chief inspiration, the central object of worship, 
nothing else, indeed, coming near to his grandeur and his 
mystery. It is to be remarked, however — and this is a dis- 
tinctive feature in the Egyptian system of worship — that the 
mystery of the sun's disappearance during the night and his 
reappearance every morning is the point in the parable of 
the sun's course to which the Egyptians attached the deepest 
significance, and to the personification of which they gave 
the most dignified place in their hierarchy of gods. Atum, 
or Amun, 'the concealed one,' was the name 
and title given to the sun after he had sunk, as mun ' 
they believed, into the under-world ; and by this name they 
worshipped the concealed Creator of all things, the ' Dweller 
in Eternity,' who was before all, and into whose bosom all 
things, gods and men, would, they thought, return in the 
lapse of ages. The figure under which they represented 
this their oldest and most venerable deity was that of a 
man, sometimes human-headed and sometimes with the 



182 THE DAWN OF HISTORV, 



man's face concealed under the head and horns of a ram — 
the word ' ram ' meaning ' concealment ' in the Egyptian lan- 
guage. The figure was coloured blue, the sacred colour of 
the Source of life. Two derivations are given for the 
name Araun. It means that which brings to light ; but it 
also expresses the simple invitation 'Come,' and in this 
sense it appears to be connected with a sentence in the 
ritual, where Atum is represented as dwelling alone in the 
under-world in the ages before creation, and on 'a day' 
speaking the word ' Come,' when immediately Osiris and 
Horus (light and the physical sun) appeared before him in 
the under-world. 

The aspect of the sun as it approached its mysterious 
setting exercised, perhaps, a still greater power over the 
thoughts of the Egyptians, and was personified 
by them in a deity, who, if not the most vener- 
able, was the best loved of all their gods. Osiris was the 
name given from the earliest times to the kind declining 
sun, who appeared to men to veil his glory, and sheathe his 
dazzling beams in a lovely, many-coloured radiance, which 
soothed and gladdened the weary eyes and hearts of men, 
and enabled them to gaze fearlessly and lovingly on the 
dread orb from which during the day they had been obliged 
to turn their eyes. This was the god who loved men and 
dwelt among them, and for man's sake permitted himself to 
be for a time quenched and defeated by the darkness —it 
was thus that the ancient people read the parable of the sun's 
evening beauty and of his disappearance beneath the shades 
of night, amplifying it, as the needs of the human heart were 
more distinctly recognized, into a real foreshadowing of that 
glorious truth towards which the whole human race was 
yearning — the truth of which these shows of nature were, 
indeed, speaking continually to all who could understand 



OSIRIS. 183 



The return of Osiris every evening into the under-world 
invested him also, for the ancient Egyptians, with the 
character of guardian and judge of souls who were supposed 
to accompany him on his mysterious journey, or at all 
events to be received and welcomed by him in Amenti (the 
realm of souls) when they arrived there. Osiris therefore 
filled a place both among the gods of the living and those 
of the dead. He was the link which connected the lives of 
the upper and the under worlds together, and made them 
one — the Lover and Dweller among men while yet in the 
body, and also the Judge and Ruler of the spirit-realm to 
which they were all bound. Two distinct personifications 
showed him in these characters. As the Dweller among 
men and the Sharer of the commonness and materiality of 
their earth-life, he was worshipped under the form of a bull 
— the Apis, in which shape his pure soul was believed con- 
stantly to haunt the earth, passing from one bull to that of 
another on the death of the animal, but never abandoning 
the land of his choice, or depriving his faithful worshippers 
of his visible presence among them. In his character of 
Judge of the dead, Osiris was represented as a mummied 
figure, of the sacred blue colour, carrying in one hand the 
rod of dominion, and in the other the emblem of life, and 
wearing on his head the double crown of Upper and Lower 
Egypt. In the judgment scenes he is seated on a throne at 
the end of the solemn hall of trial to which the soul has 
been arraigned, and in the centre of which stands the fateful 
balance where, in the presence of the evil accusing spirit and 
of the friendly funeral gods and genii who stand around, the 
heart of the man is weighed against a symbol of Divine Truth. 
Next in interest to the setting sun is the personification 
under which the Egyptians worshipped the strong young 
sun, the victorious conqueror of the night, who each morn- 



1 84 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

ing appeared to rise triumphant from the blank realm of 

darkness in which the rays of yesterday's sun had been 

quenched. They figured him as the eldest son of 
Horus. ^ . . , . , • , ■, 

Osiris, Horus, the vigorous bright youth who 

loved his father, and avenged him, piercing with his spear-like 
ray the monster who had swallowed him up. Horus is repre- 
sented as sailing up the eastern sky from the under-world 
in a boat, and slaying the serpent Night with a spear as he 
advances. The ultimate victory of life over death, of truth 
and goodness over falsehood and wrong, were the moral 
lessons which this parable of the sun's rising read to the 
ancient Egyptians. The midday sun, ruling the heavens in 
unclouded glory, symbolized to them majesty and kingly 
authority, and was worshipped as a great and powerful god 
under the name of Ra, who was often identified 
with Amun and worshipped as Amun-Ra. This 
was especially the case at Thebes. 

Though these four appearances may well seem to exhaust 
all the aspects under which the sun can be considered, there 
are still several other attributes belonging to 
him which the ancient Egyptians noticed and 
personified into other sun-gods. These we will enumerate 
more briefly. Ptah, a god of the first order, worshipped 
with great magnificence at Memphis, personified the life- 
giving power of the sun's beams, and in this character was 
sometimes mixed up with Osiris, and in the ritual is spoken 
of also as the creative principle, the ' word ' or ' power ' 
by which the essential deity revealed itself in the visible 
works of creation. Another deity, Mandoo, appears to 
personify the fierce power of the sun's rays at midday in 
summer, and was looked upon as the god of vengeance and 
destruction, a leader in war, answering in some measure, 
though not entirely, to the war-gods of other mythologies. 



THOTH. 185 



There were also Gom, Moui, and Kons, who are spoken of 
always as the sons of the sun-god, those who reveal him or 
carry his messages to mankind, and in them the rays, as 
distinguished from the disk of the sun, are apparently 
personified. The rays of the sun had also a 
feminine personification in Sekhet or Sekhet- £ *~ 
Pasht, the goddess with the lioness's head. To 
her several different and almost opposite qualities were 
attributed : as, indeed, an observer of the burning and 
enlightening rays of an Eastern sun might be doubtful 
whether to speak oftenest of the baleful fever-heat with 
which they infect the blood, or of their vivifying effects 
upon the germs of animal and vegetable life. Thus the 
lioness-goddess was at once feared and loved ; dreaded at 
one moment as the instigator of fierce passions and unruly 
desires, invoked at another as the giver of joy, the source 
of all tender and elevating emotions. Her name, Pasht, 
means ' the lioness,' and was perhaps suggested by the fierce- 
ness of the sun's rays, answering to the lion's fierce strength 
or the angry light of his eyes. She was also called the 
' Lady of the Cave,' suggesting something of mystery and 
concealment. Her chief worship was at Bubastis ; but, 
judging from the frequency of her representations, must 
have been common throughout Egypt. 

We will now take the second great light of the heavens, 
the moon, and consider the forms under which it was 
personified by the Egyptians. Rising and setting 
like the sun, and disappearing for regular periods, 
the moon was represented by a god, who, like the god of 
the setting sun, occupied a conspicuous position among the 
powers of the under-world, and was closely connected with 
thoughts of the existence of the soul after death, and the 
judgment pronounced on deeds done in the body. Thoth, 



1 86 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

'the Word,' the 'Lord of Divine Words,' was the title 
given to this deity ; but though always making one in the 
great assemblage in the judgment-hall, his office towards 
the dead does not approach that of Osiris in dignity. He is 
not the judge, he is the recorder who stands before the 
balance with the dread account in his hand, while the 
trembling soul awaits the final sentence. His character is 
that of a just recorder, a speaker of true words ; he wears 
the ostrich feather, the token of exact rigid evenness and 
impartiality, and yet he is represented as having uneven 
arms, as if to hint that the cold white light of justice, un- 
tempered by the warmth of love, cannot thoroughly appre- 
hend what it seems to take exact account of, leaving, after 
all, one side unembraced, unenlightened, as the moonlight 
casts dense shadows around the spots where its beams fall. 
The silent, watching, peering moon ! Who has not at times 
felt an inkling of the parable which the ancient Egyptians 
told of her cold eye and her un warming rays which enlighten 
chilly, and point out while they distort ? 

In spite of his uneven arms, however, Thoth (the dark 
moon and the light moon) was a great god, bearing sway in 
both worlds in accordance with his double character of the 
revealed and the hidden orb. On earth he is the great 
teacher, the inventor of letters, of arithmetic, and chro- 
nology ; the ' Lord of Words,' the ' Lover of Truth,' the 
'Great and Great.' Thoth was sometimes represented 
under the form of an ape; but most frequently with a 
human figure ibis-headed; the ibis, on account of his 
mingled black and white feathers, symbolizing the dark and 
the illumined side of the moon. Occasionally, however, he 
is drawn with a man's face, and bearing the crescent moon 
on his head, surmounted by an ostrich feather ; in his hand 
he holds his tablets and his recording pencil. 



MAUT AND NEIT. 187 

The sky-divinities were all feminine among the Egyptians ; 

representing the feminine principle of receptivity, the sky 

being regarded by them mainly as the abode, 

1 1 j rr, Maut and 

the home, of the sun and moon gods, lne Neit< 

greatest of the sky-deities was Maut, or Mut, 
the mother, who represents the deep violet night sky, 
tenderly brooding over the hot exhausted earth when the 
day was over, and wooing all living things to rest, by 
stretching cool, protecting arms above and around them. 
The beginning of all things, abysmal calm, but above all, 
motherhood, were the metaphysical conceptions which the 
ancient Egyptians connected with the aspect of the brood- 
ing heavens at midnight, and which they worshipped as the 
oldest primeval goddess, Maut. The night sky, however, 
suggested another thought, and gave rise to yet another 
personification. Night does not bring only repose ; animals 
and children sleep, but men wake and think; and, the 
strife of day being hushed, have leisure to look into their 
own minds, and listen to the still small voice that speaks 
within. Night was thus the parent of thought, the mother 
of wisdom, and a personification of the night sky was 
worshipped as the goddess of wisdom. She was named 
Neit, a word signifying ' I came from myself,' and she has 
some attributes in common with the Greek goddess of 
wisdom, Athene, whose warlike character she shared. Nu, 
another sky-goddess, who personifies the sunlit blue midday 
sky, may also on other accounts claim kinship with the 
patroness of Athens. She is the life-giver — the joy-inspirer. 
Clothed in the sacred colour which the life-giving river 
reflects, the midday sky was supposed to partake of the 
river's vivifying qualities, and its goddess Nu is very 
frequently pictured as seated in the midst of the tree of 
life, giving of its fruits to faithful souls who have completed 



188 THE DA WN OF HISTORY. 

their time of purification and travel in the under-world, and 
are waiting for admission to the Land of Aoura, the last 
stage of preparation before they are received into the im- 
mediate presence of the great gods. 

Two other aspects of the sky were considered worthy of 

personification and worship. The morning sky, or perhaps 

the eastern half of the morning sky, which 

* ^, an awaited the sun's earliest beams, and which was 
Hathor. / ' 

called Sate, and honoured as the goddess of 
vigilance and endeavour, and the beautiful western sky at 
even, more lovely in Egypt than anywhere else, to the 
exaltation of which the Egyptians applied their prettiest 
titles and symbols. Hathor, the ' Queen of Love,' was the 
name they gave to their personification of the evening sky, 
speaking of her at once as the loving and loyal wife of the 
sun, who received the weary traveller, the battered con- 
queror, to rest on her bosom after his work was done, and 
the gentle household lady whose influence called men to 
their homes when labour was finished, and collected 
scattered families to enjoy the loveliest spectacle of the 
day, the sunset, in company. Hathor is represented as a 
figure with horns, bearing the sun's disk between them, 
or sometimes carrying a little house or shrine upon her 
head. 

The sky, however, with the ancient Egyptians, did not 
include the air ; that again was personified in a masculine 
form, and regarded as a very great god, some 
of whose attributes appear to trench on those of 
Osiris, and Ptah ; Kneph was the name given to the god 
who embodied the air, the living breath or spirit ; and he 
was one of the divinities to whom a share in the work of 
creation was attributed. He is represented in a boat, 
moving over the face of the waters, and breathing life into 



ISIS. 189 

the newly created world. He was no doubt connected in 
the minds of pious Egyptians with thoughts of that breath 
of God by whose inspiration man became a living soul ; but 
in his nature-aspect he perhaps especially personified the 
wind blowing over the Nile valley after the inundation, 
and seeming to bring back life to the world by drying up 
the water under which the new vegetation was hidden. 

The soil of the country thus breathed upon, which 
responded to the rays of Osiris and the breath of Kneph 
by pouring forth a continual supply of food for 
men, was naturally enough personified into a 
deity who claimed a large share of devotion, and was 
worshipped under many titles. Isis, the sister-wife of 
Osiris, was the name given to her, and so much was said 
of Isis, and so many stories told of her, that it appears at 
times as if, under that single name, the attributes of all the 
other goddesses were gathered up. Isis, was a personifi- 
cation, not of the receptive earth only, but of the feminine 
principle in nature wherever perceived, whether in the 
tender west that received the sun, or in the brooding 
midnight sky that invited to repose, or in the cherishing 
soil that drew in the sun's warmth, and the breath of the 
wind, only to give them forth again changed into flowers 
and fruit and corn. Isis of ' the ten thousand names ' the 
Greeks called her; and if we consider her as the embodi- 
ment of all that can be said of the feminine principle, we 
shall not be surprised at her many names, or at the difficulty 
of comprehending her nature. She was, above all else, 
however, the wife of Osiris and the mother of Horus, which 
certainly points to her being, or at all events to her having 
been originally, a sky-goddess ; but then again she is spoken 
of as dressed in robes of many hues, which points to the 
changing and parti-coloured earth. Some of her attributes 



190 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

seem to connect her with the dark moon, especially the fact 
that her most important offices are towards the dead in the 
under-world, whose government she is spoken of as sharing 
with her husband Osiris. In pictures of the funeral pro- 
cession she is drawn as standing at the head of the 
mummied body during its passage over the river that 
bounds the under-world, and in that position she represents 
the beginning ; her younger sister, Nephthys, 
the end, stands at the foot of the still sleeping 
soul ; the two goddesses thus summing up, with divinity at 
each end, the little span of mortal life. In the judgment- 
hall, Isis stands behind the throne of Osiris, drooping great 
protecting wings over him and it. This quality of protect- 
ing, of cherishing and defending, appears to be the spiritual 
conception worshipped under the form of the many-named 
goddess. Isis is constantly spoken of as the protector of 
her brother Osiris, and is drawn on the tomb with long 
drooping wings. She is also frequently represented as 
nursing Horus, the son who avenged his father, and in that 
character she wears the cow's head, the cow being sacred to 
Isis, as was the bull to Osiris. 

But when we have made this summary there is one thing 
which should also be borne in mind with regard to the 
religion of Egypt. Ancient Egypt, which appears at first 
sight such a single and united empire, was in reality (and in 
this respect it was something like the Chinese empire) 
deeply infected with a sort of feudalism, in virtue of which 
the different divisions (nomes) of the country did in reality 
constitute something like different states. And each state 
tried to preserve its sense of independence by having some 
special divinity or group of divinities which it held in 
peculiar honour. So that the Egyptian pantheon itself is 
infected by this republican spirit. Almost each single god 



ANIMAL-GODS. 191 



is supreme somewhere ; elsewhere he may be almost over- 
looked. 

The origin of the strangely intimate connection between 
these Egyptian gods, and certain animals held to be sacred 

to them, and in some cases to be incarnations of 
. ..™ . . . . Animal- 

them, is a very difficult question to determine. ds 

Two explanations are given by different writers. 
One is that the animal-worship was a remnant of the religion 
of an inferior race who inhabited Egypt in times far back, and 
who were conquered but not exterminated by immigrants 
from Asia, who brought a higher civilization and a more 
spiritual religion with them, which, however, did not actually 
supersede the old, but incorporated some of its baser 
elements into itself. Other writers look upon the animal- 
worship as but another form of the unending parable from 
nature, which, as we have seen, pervades the whole Egyptian 
mythology. The animals, according to this view, being not 
less than the nature-gods worshipped as revelations of a 
divine order, manifesting itself through the many appear- 
ances of the outside world ; their obedient following of the 
laws imposed on their natures through instinct making 
them better witnesses to the Divine Will than self-willed, 
disobedient man was found to be. 

This is one of the problems which must be left to be 
determined by further researches into unwritten history, or 
perhaps by a fuller understanding of Egyptian symbols. 
That a great deal of symbolical teaching was wrapped up 
in the Egyptians' worship of animals may be gathered by 
the lesson which they drew from the natural history of the 
sacred beetle, whose habit of burying in the sand of the 
desert a ball of clay, full of eggs, which in due course 
of time changed into chrysalises and then into winged 
beetles, furnished them with their favourite emblem of the 



192 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

resurrection of the body and the continued life of the soul 
through the apparent death-sleep — an emblem which was 
wanting to no temple, and without which no body was ever 
buried. Thinking of this, we must allow that their eyes 
were not shut to the teaching of the ' visible things ' which 
in the ages of darkness yet spoke a message from God. 

We have now gone over the most important of the 
Egyptian gods, connecting them with the natural appear- 
ances which seem to have inspired them, so as to give the 
clue to a comparison with the nature-gods of the Aryans, 
of which we shall speak in the next chapter. There were, 
of course, other objects of worship, not so easily classed, 
among which we ought to mention Hapi, the personification 
of the river Nile ; Sothis, the dog-star, connected with Isis ; 
and two more of the funeral gods — Anubis, who in his 
nature-aspect may be possibly another personification of air 
and wind, and who is always spoken of as the friend and 
guardian of pure souls, and represented at the death-bed 
sometimes in the shape of a human-headed bird as helping 
the new-born soul to escape from the body; and Thmei, 
the goddess of Truth and Justice, who introduces the soul 
into the hall of judgment. The evil powers recognized 
among the ancient Egyptians were principally embodiments 
of darkness and of the waste of the desert, and do not 
appear to have had any distinct conception of moral evil 
associated with them. They are, however, spoken of in 
the book of the dead as enemies of the soul, who endeavour 
to delude it and lead it out of its way on its journey across 
the desert to the abode of the gods. Amenti was no doubt 
the desert, but not only the sunlit desert the Egyptians 
could overlook from their western hills — it included the 
unknown world beyond and underneath, to which they 
supposed the sun to go when he sank below the horizon, 



CHALDuEAN RELIGION. 193 

and where, following in his track, the shades trooped when 
they had left their bodies. The story of the trials and 
combats of the soul on its journey through Amenti to the 
judgment-hall, and its reception by the gods, is written in 
the most ancient and sacred of Egyptian books, the Ritual, 
or Book of the Dead, which has been translated into French 
by M. de Rouge, and later by M. Pierret, and into English 
by Dr. Birch. The English translation is to be found in 
the Appendix to the fifth volume of Bunsen's Egypt's Place 
in History. 

The mythologies of the other uninspired Semitic nations 
resemble the Egyptian in the main element of being per- 
sonifications of the powers of nature. The 
Chaldaeans directed their worship chiefly to- ,- . 
wards the heavenly bodies as did the ancient 
Egyptians, but not exclusively. Their principal deities were 
arranged in triads of greater and less dignity ; nearly all the 
members of these were personifications of the heavens or 
the heavenly bodies. The first triad comprised Ana, the 
heavens or the hidden sun, Father of the gods, Lord of 
Darkness, Ruler of a far-off city, Lord of Spirits. By these 
titles, suggestive of some of the attributes and offices 
towards the dead, attributed by the Egyptians to Atum 
and Osiris, was the first member of their first order of 
gods addressed by the Chaldseans. Next in order came 
Bil, also a sun-god : the Ruler, the Lord, the Source of 
kingly power, and the patron and image of the earthly 
king. His name has the same signification as Baal, and 
he personifies the same aspect of nature, the sun ruling in 
the heavens, whose worship was so widely diffused among 
all the people with whom the Israelites came in contact. 
The third member of the first triad was Hoa or Ea, who 
personified apparently the earth : Lord of the abyss, JLord 

o 



194 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

of the great deep, the intelligent Guide, the intelligent Fish, 
the Lord of the Understanding, are some of his titles, and 
appear to reveal a conception somewhat answering to that 
of Thoth. His symbol was a serpent, and he was repre- 
sented with a fish's head, which connects him with the 
Philistine's god Dagon. The second triad comprised Sin, 
or Urki, a moon-god, worshipped at Ur, Abraham's city — 
his second name Urki, means ' the watcher,' and has the same 
root as the Hebrew name for ' angel ' — San, the disk of the 
sun ; and Vul, the air. Beneath these deities in dignity, or 
rather perhaps in distance, came the five planets, each re- 
presenting some attribute or aspect of the deity, or rather 
being itself a portion of deity endowed with a special 
characteristic, and regarded as likely to be propitious to 
men from being less perfect and less remote than the 
greater gods. These planetary gods were called — Nebo 
(Mercury), the lover of light ; Ishtar (Venus), the mother 
of the gods ; Nergal (Mars), the great hero ; Bel Merodach 
(Jupiter), the ruler, the judge ; Nin (Saturn), the god of 
strength. To these gods the chief worship of the Assyrians 
was paid, and it was their majesty and strength, typifying 
that of the earthly king, which Assyrian architects per- 
sonified in the winged, man-headed bulls and lions with 
examples of which we are familiar. The gods of the 
Canaanite nations, Moloch, Baal. Chemosh, Baal-Zebub, 
and Thammuz, were all of them personifications of the sun 
or of the sun's rays, considered under one aspect or 
another ; the cruel gods, to whom human sacrifices were 
offered, representing the strong, fierce summer sun, and the 
gentle Thammuz being typical of the softer light of morning 
and of early spring, which is killed by the fierce heat of 
midday and midsummer, and mourned for by the earth till 
his return in the evening and in autumn. Ashtoreth, the 



CHALDEAN RELIGION. 195 

horned queen, symbolized by trees and worshipped in 
groves, is the moon and also the evening star; but, like 
Isis, she seems to gather up in herself the worship of the 
feminine principle in nature. The Canaanites represented 
their gods in the temples by symbols instead of by sculp- 
tured figures. An upright stone, either an aerolite or a 
precious stone (as in the case of the great emerald kept in 
the shrine of the Temple of Baal-Melcarth at Tyre), sym- 
bolized the sun and the masculine element in nature ; while 
the feminine element was figured under the semblance of a 
grove of trees, the Ashara, sometimes apparently a grove 
outside the temple, and sometimes a mimic grove kept 
within. 

There was, however, behind and beyond all these, another 
and perhaps a more ancient and more metaphysical con- 
ception of God worshipped by all the Semitic peoples of 
Asia. His name, II or El, appears to have been for Chal- 
dseans, Assyrians, Canaanites, and for the wandering tribes 
of the desert, including the progenitors of the chosen people, 
the generic name for God ; and his worship was limited to 
a distant awful recognition, unprofaned by the rites and 
sacrifices wherein the nature-gods were approached. II 
became a concealed, distant deity, too far off for worship, 
and too great to be touched by the concerns of men, among 
those nations with whom the outside aspects of nature grew 
to be concealers instead of revealers of the Divine; while 
to the chosen people the name acquired ever new signifi- 
cance, as the voice of inspiration unfolded the attributes of 
the Eternal Father to His children. 

This sketch of the heathen mythology of the Shemites is, 
it must be owned, very barren in incident and character. 
It presents, indeed, no more than a shadowy hierarchy of gods 
and heroes, through whose thin personalities the shapes of 



196 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

natural objects loom with obtrusive clearness. They may 
serve, however, as finger-posts to point the way through the 
mazes of more complex, full-grown myths, and it must also 
be remembered that we have not touched upon the later 
more ornamented stories of the Egyptian gods, such as that 
of the death and dismemberment of Osiris by his enemy 
Typhon, and the recovery of his body, and his return to life 
through the instrumentality of Isis and Horus. 



CHAPTER IX. 

ARYAN RELIGIONS. 

That morning speech of Belarius (in Cymbelin?) might serve 
as an illustration of a primitive religion, a nature- Nature- 
religion in its simplest garb : worship. 

' Stoop, boys : this gate 
Instructs you how to adore the heavens, and bows you 
To morning's holy office : the gates of monarchs 
Are arched so high, that giants may jet through 
And keep their impious turbans on, without 
Good-morrow to the sun. Hail, thou fair heaven ! 
We house i' the rock, yet use thee not so hardly 
As prouder livers do.' 

Omit only that part which speaks the bitterness of dis- 
appointed hopes which once centred round the doing as 
prouder livers do, and the rest breathes the fresh air of 
mountain life, different altogether from our life, free alike 
from its cares and temptations and moral responsibilities. 
Belarius gazes up with an unawful eye into the heavenly 
depths, and fearlessly pays his morning orisons. ' Hail, 
thou fair heaven ! ' There is no sense here of sin, humility, 
self-reproach. And in this respect — taking this for the 
moment as the type of an Aryan religion — how strongly it 
contrasts with the utterances of Hebrew writers ! Is this 



198 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

the voice of natural as opposed to inspired religion ? Not 
altogether ; for the Semitic mind was throughout antiquity 
imbued with a deeper sense of awe or fear — awe in the 
higher religion, fear in the lower — than ever belonged to 
the Aryan character. We see this difference in the religions 
of Egypt and Assyria ; and it will be remembered that, when 
speaking of the earliest records of the Semitic and Aryan 
races, we took occasion to say that it may very well have 
been to their admixture of Semitic blood that the Egyptians 
stood indebted for the mystic and allegorical part of their 
religious system ; for among all the Semitic people, whether 
in ancient or modern times, we may observe a tendency — if 
no more — towards religious thought, and towards thoughts 
of that mystic character which characterized the Egyptian 
mythology. 

But the Aryans grew up and formed themselves into 
nations, and developed the germs of their religion apart 
from external influence, and in a land which from the 
earliest times had belonged to them alone. Their character, 
their religion, their national life, were their own ; and though 
in after-times these went through distinctive modifications, 
when the stems of nations that we know, Greeks, Latins, 
Germans, and the rest, grew out of the Aryan stock, they 
yet bore amid these changes the memory of a common 
ancestry. The land in which they dwelt was favourable to 
the growth of the imaginative faculties, and to that lightness 
and brightness of nature which afterwards so distinguished 
the many-minded Greeks, rather than to the slow, brooding 
character of the Eastern mind. There, down a hundred 
hillsides and along a hundred valleys trickled the rivulets 
whose waters were hurrying to swell the streams of the Oxus 
and the Jaxartes. And each hill and valley had its separate 
community, joined, indeed, by language and custom to the 



SKY- AND SUN-GODS. 199 

common stock, but yet living a separate simple life in its 

own home, which had, one might almost say, its individual 

sun and sky as well as hill and river. No doubt in such a 

land innumerable local legends and beliefs sprang up, and 

these, though lost to us now, had their effects upon the 

changes which among the many branches of the race the 

Aryan mythology underwent — a mythology which before all 

others is remarkable for the endless diversity of its legends, 

for the infinite rainbow-tints into which its essential thoughts 

are broken. 

Despite these divergences, the Aryans had a common 

chief deity — the sky, the 'fair heaven.' This, the most 

abstracted and intangible of natural appearances, 

1 1 j j Sky- and 

at the same time the most exalted and un- su ' ods 

changing, seemed to them to speak most plainly 

of an all-embracing deity. And though their minds were 

open to all the thousand voices of nature, and their 

imaginations equal to the task of giving a personality to 

each, yet none, not even the sun himself, imaged so well 

their ideal of a highest All-Father as did the over-arching 

heaven. 

The traces of this primitive belief the Aryan people 

carried with them on their wanderings. This sky-god was 

the Dyaus (the sky) of Indian mythology, the Zeus of the 

Greeks, the Jupiter of the Romans, and the Zio, Tew, or 

Tyr of the Germans and Norsemen. For all these names 

are etymologically allied. Zeus (gen. Dios) and Dyaus are 

from the same root ; so are Jupiter (anciently Diupiter) and 

the compound form Dyaus-pitar (father Dyaus) ; and Zio 

and Tew also bear traces of the same origin. Indeed, it is 

by the reappearance of this name as the name of a god 

among so many different nations that we argue his having 

once 'been the god of all the Ayran people. The case is 



200 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

like that of our word daughter. As we find this reappearing 
in the Greek thugater, and the Sanskrit duhitar, we feel sure 
that the old Aryans had a name for daughter from which all 
these names are derived ; and as we find the Sanskrit name 
alone has a secondary meaning, signifying ' the milker,' we 
conclude that this was the original meaning of the name for 
a daughter. Just so, Zeus and Jupiter and Zio and Dyaus 
show a common name for the chief Aryan god ; but the last 
alone explains the meaning of that name, for Dyaus signifies 
the sky. 

This sky-god, then, stood to the old Aryans for the notion 
of a supreme and common divinity. Whatever may have 
been the divinities reigning over local streams and woods, 
they acknowledged the idea of one overruling Providence 
whom they could only image to their minds as the over- 
spreading sky. This, we may say, was the essential feature 
in their religion, its chief characteristic ; whereas to the 
Semitic nations, the sun, the visible orb, was in every case 
the supreme god. The reason of this contrast does not, it 
seems to me, lie only in the different parts which the sun 
played in the southern and more northern regions ; or, if it 
arises in the difference of the climate, it not the less forms 
an important chapter in religious development. There are 
discernible in the human mind two diverse tendencies in 
dealing with religious ideas. Both are to be found in every 
religion, among every people ; one might almost say in every 
heart. The first tendency is an impulse upwards — a desire 
to press the mind continually forward in an effort to idealize 
the deity, but, by exalting or seeming to exalt Him into the 
highest regions of abstraction, it runs the risk of robbing Him 
of all fellowship with man, and man of all claims upon His 
sympathy and love. Then comes the other tendency, 
which oftentimes at one stroke brings down the deity as 



SKY- AND SUN-GODS. 201 

near as possible to the level of human beings, and leaves 
him at the end no more than a demi-god or exalted man. 
One may be called the metaphysical, the other the mytho- 
logical tendency ; and we shall never be able to understand 
the history of religions until we learn to see how these 
influences interpenetrate and work in every system. They 
show at once that a distinction must be drawn between 
mythology and religion. The supreme god will not be he of 
whom most tales are invented, because, as these tales must 
appeal to human interests and relate adventures of the 
human sort, they will cling more naturally round the name 
of some inferior divinity. The very age of mythology — so 
far as regards the beings to whom it relates x — is probably 
rather that of a decaying religion. 

In any case, there will probably be a metaphysical and 
a mythological side to every system. Thus among the 
Egyptians, Amun, the concealed, was the metaphysical 
god; but their mythology centred round the names of 
Osiris and Horus. And just so with the Aryans, the sky 
was the original, most abstracted, and most metaphysical 
god ; the sun rose into prominence in obedience to the 
wish of man for a more human divinity. If the Semitic 
people were more inclined toward sun-worship, the Aryans 
inclined rather toward heaven-worship ; and the difference 
is consistent with the greater faculty for abstract thought 
which has always belonged to our race. 

The two influences of which we have spoken are perfectly 
well marked in Aryan mythology. The history of it may 
almost be said to represent the rivalry between the sky-gods 
and the gods of the sun. It is on account of his daily 

1 That is to say, the stories themselves may be old enough ; the ap- 
plication of them to some special members of a pantheon marks the 
condition of the creed. 



202 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

change that the last far less becomes the position of a 
supreme god. Born each day in the east, faint and weak 
he battles with the clouds of morning ; radiant and strong 
he mounts into the midday sky ; and then, having touched 
his highest point, he turns to quench his beams in the 
shadowy embrace of night. Even the Egyptians and 
Assyrians, in view of these vicissitudes, were driven to 
invent a sort of abstract sun, separated in thought from the 
mere visible orb. This daily course might stand as an 
allegory of the life of man. The luminary who underwent 
these changing fortunes, however great and godlike in 
appearance, must have some more than common relationship 
with the world below ; he must be either a hero raised 
among the gods, or, better (for of this thought the Aryans 
too had their dim foreshadowing), he is an Avatar, an 
Incarnation of the Godhead, come down to take upon him 
for a while the painful life of men. This was the way the 
sun-gods were regarded by the Indo-European nations. 
Accordingly, while their deepest religious feelings belonged 
to the abstract god Zeus, Jupiter among the Greeks and 
Romans, Dyaus and later on Brahma (a pure abstraction) 
among the Indians, the stories of their mythology belonged 
to a more human divinity, who in most cases is the sun-god. 
He is the Indra 1 of the Hindus, who wrestles with the 
black serpent, the Night, as Horus did with Typhon ; he is 
the Apollo of the Greeks, likewise the slayer of the serpent, 
the Python ; or else he is Heracles (Hercules), the god-man 
— sometimes worshipped as a god, sometimes as a demi-god 
on ly — the great and mighty hero, the performer of innumer- 
able labours for his fellows ; or he is Thor, the Hercules 

1 The etymology of Indra's name is uncertain. It cannot therefore 
be said whether or no he was originally a sun-god, though he has many 
of the attributes of one. In the Vedas he is also a god of storms. 



SKY- AND SUN-GODS. 203 

of the Norsemen, the enemy of the giants and of the great 
earth-serpent, which represent the dark chaotic forces of 
nature ; or Frey, the bearer of the sword, or the mild Balder, 
the fairest of all the gods, the best-beloved by gods and 
men. 

It is clear that a different character of worship will belong 
to each order of divinity. The sacred grove or the wild 
mountain-summit would be naturally dedicated to the mys- 
terious pervading presence ; the temple would be the natural 
home of the human-featured god; and this all the more 
because men worshipped in forest glade or upon mountain- 
top before they dedicated to their gods houses made with 
hands. Dyaus is the old, the primevally old, divinity, the 'son 
of time ' as the Greeks called him. 1 Whenever, therefore, we 
trace the meeting streams of thought, the cult of the sun-god 
and the cult of the sky, to the latter belongs the conservative 
part of the national creed, his rival is the reforming element. 
In the Vedic religion of India, Indra, as has been said, has 
vanquished the older deity ; we feel in the Vedas that Dyaus, 
or even another sky-god, Varuna, though often mentioned, 
no longer occupy a commanding place. Not, however, 
without concessions on both sides. Indra could not have 
achieved this victory but that he partakes of both natures. 
He is the sky as well as the sun, more human than the un- 
moved watching heavens, he is a worker for man, the sender 
of the rain and the sunshine, the tamer of the stormwinds, 
and the enemy of darkness. 

And if any one should examine in detail the different 
systems of the Aryan people, he would, I think, have no 
difficulty in tracing throughout them the two influences 

1 Welcker maintains {Griech. Gotterlehre) that the title, Son of Time, 
belonged to Zeus before Kronos (Chronos) was invented as a personality 
to be the father of Zeus. 



204 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

which have been dwelt upon, and in each connecting these 
two influences with their sky- and sun-gods. Whatever 
theory may be used to account for it, the change of thought 
is noticeable. Man seems to awake into the world with 
the orison of Belarius upon his lips ; he is content with 
the silent unchanging abstract god. But as he advances 
in the burden and heat of the day he wishes for a fellow- 
worker, or at least for some potency which watches his 
daily struggles with less of godlike sublime indifference. 
Hence arise his sun-gods — the gods who toil and suffer, 
and even succumb and die. 

The sky- and the sun-gods, then, were, I think, the two 

chief male divinities among the Aryan folk taken as a 

whole. There corresponded to them in most 

The eart - ^r yan cree d s two female divinities, an older 

goddess. J 

and a younger, a wife and a maiden, such as 

were on the one side among the Greeks Hera and Demeter, 
and on the other side Athene and Artemis, 1 or Persephone, 
the daughter of Demeter. In the Norse creed, again, there 
is Frigg, the wife of Odin, and Freyja, the sister of Frey. 
This last is indeed not a maiden in the Eddie mythology. 
But the husband of Freyja is a person of such very small 
importance that we may feel sure he is only a sort of 
addendum to her nature and surroundings, and that she is 
in character very much the counterpart of her brother, a 
maiden-goddess — goddess of spring-time and of love. 

In respect to the elder, the married goddess, we may say, 
almost with certainty, that she is the earth — the natural 
wife of the heavens, and naturally thought of as the mother 
of all mankind — Terra Mater. We know that the ancient 
Germans worshipped a goddess whom Tacitus calls Nerthus 

1 I purposely leave out Aphrodite (Venus) from this category, as she 
partakes so much of the nature of an Oriental goddess. 



GODDESSES OF SPRING AND DAWN. 205 

(possibly a mistake for Hertha, Earth), and, he adds, 
Nerthus id est Terra Mater. And in the Scandinavian 
offshoot of the ancient German creed there can be no doubt 
that the same idea of Mother Earth is embodied in the 
goddess Frigg, the wife of Odin. 

The Romans had their native goddess Tellus, who was 
only obscured in later times by such Greek or half-Greek 
divinities as Demeter or Cybele. For this Demeter of the 
Greeks bears a name which most philologists are agreed had 
a signification precisely the same as Terra Mater — Ge-meter. 
Demeter is but one of many wives of Zeus mentioned in the 
Theogony of Hesiod. All of these wives, including Hera 
(Juno), the highest in rank of them all, were probably at 
one time or another personifications of the earth. 

The Vedas, too, have their mother-goddess, their Mother 
Earth. This is Prithvi, or Prithivi, the wide-stretching, 
generally called Prithivi-matar, which is also Earth-Mother. 
And some think this word ' Prithvi' is connected with that 
of the Northern Frigg. 1 And the Vedas have their young 
maiden-goddess, who in the Vedas is called Ushas the 
Dawn. 

What is the nature-significance of this maiden-goddess ? 
It is less easy to determine than in the case of the other 
three divinities. One form of the maiden- Goddesses 
goddess is the divinity of the seed, like Perse- of Spring 
phone, that is to say, a goddess of all vegetation, and Dawn - 
and hence of the spring. In the Vedas, again, Ushas is a 
goddess of the dawn, an idea nearly allied to that of Spring; 
and some people think that this is also the foundation of 
Athene's nature. There are other characteristics of the 
maiden-goddess which look as if she were an embodiment 
of the clouds ; but then the clouds are so nearly connected 
" l Not directly, however; see Grimm, D. M., vol. i., p. 252. 



206 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

with the dawn that such an idea can scarcely be said to 
contradict the other notion. The maiden-goddess is in 
many cases born of the sea. Not only is Aphrodite, or 
Venus, born of the sea, but Athene is so likewise ; at any 
rate one of her names, Tritogeneia, implies this origin. 
The more common story of Athene's birth, that she sprang 
from the head of her father, Zeus — this, too, when we 
remember that Zeus is the sky, is not inconsistent with 
her being the cloud. 

When all is said, it must be owned that the nature-origin 
of this maiden-goddess is not so obvious as in the case of 
the divinities of the sky, sun, or earth. That only means 
that, as a nature-goddess, she is not so necessary to the 
creed, but that on the other hand many objects of nature — 
the dawn, the clouds, streams, the wind, sunshine — have 
suggested the thought of this divinity, and that the sugges- 
tion found a natural echo in the heart of mankind. 

There are, of course, behind the greater nature-gods a 
number of other natural forces — the sea, the wind, lightning, 
fire, streams, fountains, the dawn, the clouds. These all 
receive their place in the Aryan pantheon. But the 
characters of the lesser gods tend to echo those of the 
greater. Sometimes two different but nearly allied objects 
of nature are rolled into one to form a new god. 

Thus the god of storms and thunder is often associated 
with the sky, as are Zeus and Jupiter among the Greeks and 
Romans. Dyaus, the most primitive form of sky-god, is 
the clear heaven. The name is connected with a root div, 
to shine. But Zeus and Jupiter are the cloudy or thundery 
skies. The Vedic Indra is often not unlike them. That 
is to say, the sky-god, in their persons, has taken upon him 
the nature of the god of storms. But despite these changes, 
we may still go back to the gods of earth, and sky, and sun, 



INDRA. 207 



and cloud as forming the backbone of the Aryan creed taken 
as a whole. 

From this primitive stock different religious systems 
developed themselves just as different nationalities sprang 
from the original Aryan race. We can only Vedic re- 
form an adequate idea of what these religious ligion of 
systems were like by studying them in the books India - 
of religion, of poetry, and mythology which the various 
peoples have left behind them. And as a matter of fact, 
we have really only three or four literatures of ancient 
religion and mythology among the different branches of 
the Aryan people from which much information can be 
gained. These are the Vedas for the ancient Indians, 
Greek literature for the religion of the Greeks, and the 
Old Norse poetry— what we may call the Eddaic literature 
— for the religion of the Scandinavians. The Romans, 
before their literature began, had almost exchanged their 
early creed for that of the Greeks ; the other German 
races (not Scandinavian) and the Slavs left no record of 
their beliefs before they were converted to Christianity. 
Of the Zend Avesta, the religious book of the Persians, 
we will speak hereafter. 

Naturally enough, each separate creed has developed 

many peculiar features. In the religion of India, Indra, who 

had been the younger and more active divinity 

. , 1 1 Indra. 

— whether a sun-god or no we cannot be quite 

sure — had, before the Vedas came to be written, almost 

completely ousted Dyaus from the supreme position which 

he once occupied. The worship of Indra is the central 

point of Vedic religion ; and in many hymns of the Vedas 

Indra has taken the character of a god of storms ; almost 

as much so as Zeus and Jupiter, It was the power of the 



208 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

god which was especially worshipped. He was no doubt 
the god of battles par excelle7ice to the ancient Indian. 
The Vedic hymnist calls upon him, as the Psalmist calls 
upon Jehovah, to show his might and confound those who 
dared to doubt his supremacy. For here in India, as in 
Palestine, ' the wicked saith in his heart There is no God.' 

HYMN TO INDRA. 

Indra speaks. 

* I come with might before thee, stepping first, 

And behind me move all the heavenly powers. . 

The Poet speaks. 

* If thou, O Indra, wilt my lot bestow, 

A hero's part dost thou perform for me. 

* To thee the holy drink I offer first ; 

Thy portion here is laid, thy soma l brewed. 
Be, while I righteous am, to me a friend ; 
So shall we slay of foemen many a one. 

' Ye who desire blessings bring your hymn 

To Indra, for the true is always true. 
" There is no Indra," many say. " Who ever 

Hath seen him ? Why should we his praise proclaim ? " 

Indra speaks. 

' I am here, singer ; look on me, here stand I. 

In might all other beings I surpass. 
Thy holy service still my strength renews, 
And thereby smiting, all things I smite down. 

' And as on heaven's height I sat alone, 

To me thy offering and thy prayer rose up. 
Then spake my soul this word unto herself : 

" My votaries and their children call upon me.'" 

1 Soma was the mystic (and no doubt intoxicating) drink used in the 
sacrifices, and poured as libation to the gods. It was personified as 
a divinity. 



INDRA. 



209 



The character of Indra, then, is, as we find it in the Vedas, 
more like that of a supreme Zeus than of any other divinity 
of the parallel Aryan religious systems. But his deeds, 
the mythology connected with his name, remind us of the 
deeds of Apollo. For he is the great serpent- or dragon- 
slayer, like the Greek Apollo and the Northern Thor. 
Heracles, too, as we remember, is a serpent-slayer. The 
* enemy' whom Indra is most constantly implored to strike 
are two serpents, Ahi and Vritra. These are serpents of 
darkness, but they are also the concealers of the water, and 
this water Indra sets free. 'Him (the serpent) the god 
struck with Indra-might, and set free the all-gleaming water 
for the use of man.' Therefore these serpents must also 
typify the clouds. 

In going forth to fight, Indra is accompanied by a 
band of supernatural heroes, who have no exact counter- 
part in any of the other Aryan mythologies, and who are 
certainly beings, children we might say, of the storm. 
Their name is the Maruts. And some of the many hymns 
dedicated to them have a fine martial ring, like the tramp 
of armed men — 

HYMN TO THE MARUTS. 

' Where is the fair assemblage of heroes, 

The men of Rudra, 1 with their bright horses ? 

For of their birth knoweth no man the story, 

Only themselves, their wondrous descent. 

' The light they flash upon one another ; 

The eagles fought, the winds were raging ; 

But this secret knoweth the wise man, 

Once that Prishna 2 her udder gave them. 



1 The JZas/i, the father of the Maruts (?). 

2 The dew? ( = Prokris ?) imaged here as a cow. She is the mother 
of the Maruts. 



210 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

' Our race of heroes, through the Maruts be it 

Ever victorious in reaping of men. 

On their way they hasten, in brightness the brightest, 

Equal in beauty, unequalled in might.' 

The god who is most peculiar to the Vedic pantheon is 
Agni, the Fire-god. The word Agni is allied to the Latin 
ignis. No doubt Agni has his representatives 
in the creeds of other Aryan peoples, in the 
Hephaestus of the Greeks, or in the Vulcan of the Romans ; 
probably in the Loki of the Scandinavians. But these are 
all quite secondary beings : Loki cannot be called a god 
at all. Agni, on the other hand, is one of the very greatest 
of the Vedic deities. Only Indra has more hymns dedi- 
cated to him than Agni. This shows how great was the 
reverence which fire commanded among the Indians, and 
it is consistent with much that has been said in an earlier 
chapter of the importance which primitive people always 
attach, and which the native Indians to this day still attach, 
to the sacred house-fire in their midst It reminds us too 
of the fire-worship of the Persians. 1 

Agni, however, is not only the house-fire. He has a 
double birth — one on earth, one in the clouds. He descends 
as the lightning descends from heaven. But, at the same 
time, he is born of the rubbing of two sticks, and in the flame 
of the sacrifice he is imagined to ascend again to heaven 
bringing with him the prayers of the worshipper. How well, 
therefore, Agni was adapted to take the place of the younger 
god, the friend of man, when Indra, once probably a sun- 
god, had (so to say) removed himself from familiar approach 
by taking his throne high in heaven ! 

1 Though the character of this has been a good deal exaggerated in 
the popular notions of the religion of the ancient Persians, 



AGNI. 211 



HYMN TO AGNI. 

' Agni is messenger of all the world. 
***** 
Skyward ascends his flame the merciful, 

With our libations watered well ; 
And now the red smoke seeks the heavenly way, 
And men enkindle Agni here. 

' We make of thee our Herald, Holy One ; 

Bring down the gods unto our feast. 
O son of night, and all who nourish man, 
Pardon us when on you we call. 

'Thou, Agni, art the ruler of the house; 
Thou at the altar art our priest. 
O purifier, wise and rich in good, 
O sacrificer, bring us safely now.' 

There are other genuine sun-gods in the Vedic creed, to 
whom hymns are addressed. One of these is Mitra. 1 
Mitra too is a friend of man — 

To man comes Mitra down in friendly converse. 
Mitra it was who fixed the earth and heaven. 
Unslumbering mankind he watches over. 
To Mitra then your full libations pour.' 

But there are not many hymns addressed to Mitra alone. 
And he stands far behind Indra or Agni in the Vedic creed 
as we actually find it. Another sun-god — the disk of the 
sun, so to say — is Surya, the shiner. He is sometimes 
called the eye of Mitra and Varuna. But in other places 
he is said to come through heaven dragging his wheel. Yet 
great as he is, the sun-god is compelled to follow his daily 

1 Mitra is associated with the idea of the sun. But I incline to 
think that originally he was rather the wind of morning, or even the 
morning sky. He is almost always linked in the hymns with Varuna, 
who most certainly was at one time the sky (ovpav6s), and once a 
supreme god. See what is said below of Surya. 



THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



round. ' He travels upon changeless paths.' Another 
sun-god is Savitar, whose name is almost identical in mean- 
ing with Surya. 

The writers of the Vedic hymns were very largely taken 

up with observing and recording in their mythic fashion all 

the skyey phenomena from dawn to sunset. 

Dawn and For £ach changed aS p ect Q f the heavens, bright 

or cloudy, calm or windy, they had a divinity. 
They sang to the fair young morning as she came out of 
the chambers of darkness and opened the stalls for the 
cattle to go forth to pasture ; they sang the heavy labouring 
sun of midday ; they sang the stormy sky or the hurrying 
clouds ; and at evening they sang the evening sun sinking 
peacefully to rest and bringing ' night and peace ' to all the 
world. Wherefore, to bring to a close this picture of the 
religion of the Vedas, we will give just two more hymns 
from that vast collection, the Rig- Veda — a hymn to the 
morning, and a hvmn to the sun (Savitar) at sun-setting. 

HYMN TO THE DAWN. 

* Dawn full of wisdom, rich in everything ! 
Fairest ! attend the singers' song of praise. 
O thou rich goddess, old, yet ever young ! 
Thou, all-dispenser, in due order comest, 

' Shine forth, O goddess, thine eternal morning, 
With thy bright cars our song of praise awakening. 
Thee draw through heaven the well-yoked team of horses— 
The horses golden-bright, that shine afar. 

* Enlightener of all being, breath of morning, 
Thou holdest up aloft the light of gods. 
Unto one goal ever thy course pursuing, 
Oh, roll towards us now thy wheel again I 

* Opening at once her girdle, she appears, 
The lovely Dawn, the ruler of the stalls. 
She, light-producing, wonder-working, noble, 
Up-mounted from the coast of earth and heaven. 



DAWN AND EVENING. 213 

' Up, up, and bring to meet the Dawn, the goddess 
Bright beaming now, your humble song of praise. 
To heaven climbed up her ray the sweet due bearing, 
Joying to shine the airy space she filled,, 

f With beams of heaven the Pure One was awakened, 
The Rich One's ray mounted through both the worlds. 
To Ushas * goest thou, Agni, with a prayer 
For goodly wealth, when she bright-shining comes.' 

HYMN TO THE EVENING SUN. 

' Savitar the god arose, in power arose, 
His quick deeds and his journey to renew. 
He 'tis who to all gods dispenses treasure, 
And blesses those that call him to the feast. 

* The god stands up and stretches forth his arm, 
Raises his hand and all obedient wait ; 
For all the waters to his will incline, 
And the winds even on his path are stilled. 

' Now he unyokes the horses that have borne him, 
The wanderer from his travel now he frees, 
The serpent-slayer's fury now is stayed ; 
At Savitar's command come night and peace. 

And now rolls up the spinning wife her web, 
The artificer now his cunning labour leaves, 

****** 
And to the household folk beneath the roof, 
The household fire imparts their share of light. 

****** 
' He who to work went forth is now returned, 
The longing of all wand'rers turns toward home ; 
Leaving his toil, goes each man to his house : 
The universal mover orders so. 

' In the water set test thou the water's heir, 2 
On the firm earth badst the wild beast to roam ; 
The bird 3 makes for his nest, cattle for their stall, 
To their own home all beasts the sun-god sends.' 

] The Dawn. See p. 205. 2 The fish. 

3 Literally, ' the egg's son.' 



214 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

In Greece it would seem that the chief religious in- 
fluences came from Zeus (Jupiter 1 ) and Apollo, and belonged, 
as appears, to two separate branches of the same 

, r race who came together to form the Hellenic 

religion. 

people. The ancestors of the Greeks had, we 

know, travelled from the Aryan home by a road which took 

them south of the Black Sea, and on to the table-land of 

Asia Minor. So far a comparison of names and traditions 

shows them advancing in a compact body. Here they 

separated ; and, after a stay of some centuries, during which 

a part had time to mingle with the Semitic people of the 

land, they pushed forward, some across the Hellespont and 

round that way by land through Thrace and Thessaly, 

spreading as they went down to the extremity of the 

peninsula ; others to the western coast of Asia Minor, and 

then, when through the lapse of years they had learnt their 

art from the Phoenician navigators who frequented all that 

land, onward from island to island, as over stepping-stones, 

across the ^Egean. 

The Pelasgic Zeus, however, is not quite the same being as 

is the Zeus whom we are to fancy as the supreme god of the 

Hellenic race. This last, we know, is called 

the Olympic Zeus. The Pelasgic god is a 

being who loves solitary mountain heights or dark groves of 

trees. In this aspect of his character he is very like the 

chief divinity of the Northmen, Odin. And there can be no 

1 It has been already said that the Latin mythology, as we know it, 
is almost all borrowed directly from the Greek. It is obviously right, 
therefore, to call the deities by their Greek, and not, as was till recently 
always done, by their Latin names. The Latin gods had no doubt 
much of the character of their Greek brethren ; but it is to the Greek 
poets that we are really indebted for what we know about them. In 
this chapter, for the sake of clearness, the Latin name is generally given 
in parentheses after the Greek one. 



ZEUS. 215 



doubt that in his nature he is a god of storms and wind. 
He is not the clear sky, as is the Vedic Dyaus (from the root 
div, shining), and as had once been the supreme god of the 
Aryan race. From that condition to the condition of a god 
of storms, Zeus had already passed before we catch any 
sight of him under this name Zeus — in other words, before 
we catch any sight of hi?n at all. 

These Pelasgi were before all things the worshippers of 
pure nature. Theirs were all those primitive elements in 
the Greek religion which were caught up into the more de- 
veloped creed, and, though they were softened in the pro- 
cess of amalgamation with it, still showed above its surface 
as masses of rock show upon a hillside, albeit they are 
covered over by a thin covering of green. Those strange 
half-human beings like Pan, the Arcadian god, like the 
Thessalian centaurs, — these belong to the primitive creed 
of the Greeks. So long as they were confounded with the 
phenomena of nature in which they took their rise, they 
were, in every sense, natural enough. But when art took 
possession of them, and tried to body them forth in visible 
shapes, they became monsters, unformed, neither man nor 
beast. 

The fact that the greatest shrines of Zeus were at Dodona 
in Epirus, and in Elis, both states on the western coast of 
Greece, would almost of itself show that the worship of Zeus 
belonged more especially to the first comers of the Greek 
race, who got pushed further westward as the more en- 
lightened people came in from the east ; and while these 
were worshipping their gods in temples, the Pelasgic Greeks 
still worshipped their Zeus in sacred groves like those of 
Dodona and of Elis. 

The god, on the other hand, who is more especially the 
god of the newer Greek people, the Dorians and the Ionians, 



216 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

those who reformed the Greek race, and through whom the 

Pelasgic people grew into the Hellenes, this 
Apollo. . ° r 

god is Apollo. 

Apollo is, we have said, in origin a sun-god. We see 
some traces of his nature even in the statues which repre- 
sent him, as in the abundant hair which streams from his 
head, the picture of the sun's rays. 1 But, of course, long 
before historic days he had become much more than a 
mere god of nature to his worshippers. He had become 
what we know him, the ideal of youthful manhood as the 
Greeks admired it most, the ideal of suppleness and 
strength, the ideal, too, of what we call ' culture,' of poetry 
and music, and all that adds a grace to life. 

Apollo's chief shrines were rather on the eastern than on 
the western side of Greece — at Delphi, for example, in 
Phocis. (Is it not characteristic to find in this wise the 
oracle of Apollo at Delphi, the oracle of Zeus at Dodona ?) 
But Delphi is the most westerly of Apollo's favourite 
homes. Another, we know, was on the island of Delos, mid- 
way in the ^Egean, that island which the Greeks fancied the 
umbilicus orbis — the navel of the world. Delphi and Delos 
are the shrines of Apollo belonging to one out of the two 
great nationalities of the new blood who reformed the nation 
of the Greeks. Delphi and Delos belong to the Dorians. 
But among the Ionians of Asia Minor, who were the other 
great reforming element in Greek life, Apollo had likewise 
many holy places. And we know how, in the Iliad, he is 
represented as the champion of the easterns, the Asiatic 

1 To appreciate this we must compare the representations of Apollo 
with those of Helios, who was simply and frankly a sun-god even to the 
later Greeks, and we see that they are essentially the same personality. 
Even in the very early statues of Apollo, where the artist had not the 
skill to make wide, flowing locks, the hair is always indicated with great 
care and some elaboration of detail. 



HERMES. 217 

Greeks, against the westerns, the Greeks of Greece proper. 
1 Hear me,' prays Glaucus, in the Iliad — ' hear me, O king, 
who art somewhere in the rich realm of Lycea or of Troy ; 
for everywhere canst thou hear a man in sorrow, such as my 
sorrow is.' 

Not but that these worshippers of Apollo were likewise 
worshippers of Zeus. It was from the Dorians, whose 
ancient home was in Thessaly, in the vale of Tempe, and 
under the shadow of Olympus, that sprang the worship of 
the Olympian Zeus. This Olympian Zeus was the same as 
the ancient god of the Pelasgians — the Pelasgian Zeus — the 
same, and yet different, for he was the ancient storm-god, 
softened and made more human by his contact with Apollo. 
In time this Olympian Zeus superseded the Pelasgic god 
even in his own favourite seats, and we have the phenomenon 
of the festival in his honour — the greatest festival of Greece 
— the Olympia, being held in the plains of Elis, near the 
ancient grove of the Pelasgian Zeus. 

As before by a comparison of words, so now in my- 
thology by a comparison of legends, we form our notion 

of the remoteness of the time at which these TT 

Hermes, 
stories first passed current. Not only, for in- 
stance, do we see that Indra and Apollo resembled each 
other in character, but we have proof that nature-myths 
— stories really narrating some process of nature — were 
familiar alike to Greeks and Indians. The Vedas, the 
sacred books from which we gather our knowledge of 
ancient Hindu religion, do not relate their stories of the 
gods in the same way, or with the same clearness and 
elaboration, that the Greek poets do. They are collections 
of hymns, prayers in verse, addressed to the gods them- 
selves, and what they relate is told more by reference and 



218 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



implication than directly. But even with this difference, 
we have no difficulty in signalizing some of the adventures 
of Indra as almost identical with those of the son of Leto. 
Let one suffice. The pastoral life of the Aryans is reflected 
in their mythology, and thus it is that in the Vedas almost 
all the varied phenomena of nature are in their turn com- 
pared to cattle. Indra is often spoken of as a bull ; still more 
commonly are the clouds the cows of Indra, and their milk 
the rain. More than one of the songs of the Rig-Veda 
allude to a time when the wicked Pams (beings of fog or 
mist 1 ) stole the cows from the fields of Indra and hid 
them away in a cave. They obscured their footprints by 
tying up their feet or by making them drag brushwood behind 
them. Then Indra sent his dog Sarama (the dawn or breath 
of dawn), and she found out where the cattle were hidden. 
But (according to one story) the Pa/zis overcame her honesty 
and gave her a cup of milk to drink, so that she came back 
to Indra and denied having seen the cows. But Indra 
discovered the deception, and came with his strong spear 
and conquered the Pazzis, and recovered what had been 
stolen. 

Now turn to the Greek myth. The story here is cast in a 
different key. 

' Te boves olim nisi reddidisses 
Per dolum amotas, puerum minaci 
Voce dum terret, viduus pharetra 
Risit Apollo.' 

Hermes (Mercury) is here the thief. He steals the cattle 
of Apollo feeding upon the Pierian mountain, and conceals 
his theft much as the Pams had done. Apollo discovers 
what has been done, and complains to Zeus. But Hermes 
is a god, and no punishment befalls him like that which was 
1 A word allied to our fen. 



HERACLES. 219 



allotted to the Pams ; he charms Apollo by the sound of his 
lyre, and is forgiven, and allowed to retain his booty. Still, 
all the essentials of the story are here; and the story in 
either case relates the same nature-myth. The clouds which 
in the Indian tale are stolen by the damp vapours of morn- 
ing, are in the Greek legend filched away by the morning 
breeze ; for this is the nature of Hermes. And that some 
such power as the wind had been known to the Indians as 
accomplice in the work, is shown by the complicity of 
Sarama in one version of the tale. For Sarama likewise 
means the morning breeze; and, in fact, Sarama and 
Hermes are derived from the same root, and are almost 
identical in character. Both mean in their general nature 
the wind ; in their special appearances they stand now for 
the morning, now for the evening breeze, or even for the 
morning and evening themselves. 

The next most important deity as regards the whole 
Greek race is Heracles (Hercules). It is a great mistake 
to regard him, as our mythology-books often 
lead us to do, as a demi-god or hero only. 
Originally, and among a portion of the Greek race, he was 
one of the mightiest gods ; but at last, perhaps because his 
adventures became in later tradition rather preposterous 
and undignified, he sank to be a demi-god, or immortalized 
man. The story of Heracles' life and labours is a pure but 
most elaborate sun-myth. From his birth, where he 
strangles the serpents in his cradle — the serpents of dark- 
ness, like the Python which Apollo slew — through his 
Herculean labours to his death, we watch the labours of the 
sun through the mists and clouds of heaven to its ruddy 
setting; and these stories are so like to others which are 
told of the Northern Heracles, Thor, that we cannot refuse 
to believe that they were known in the main in days before 



220 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

there were either Greek-speaking Greeks or Teutons. The 
closing scene of Heracles' life speaks the most eloquently 
of his nature-origin. Returning home in victory — his last 
victory — to Trachis, Deianira sends to him there the fatal 
white robe steeped in the blood of Nessus. No sooner has 
he put it on than his death-agony begins. In the madness 
of his pain he dashes his companion, Lichas, against the 
rocks ; he tears at the burning robe, and with it brings 
away the flesh from his limbs. Then, seeing that all is over, 
he becomes more calm. He gives his last commands to 
his son, Hyllus, and orders his funeral pile to be prepared 
upon mount OEta, as the sun, after its last fatal battle with 
the clouds of sunset, sinks down calmly into the sea. Then 
as, after it has gone, the sky lights up aglow with colour, so 
does the funeral pyre of Heracles send out its light over the 
^Egean, from its western shore. 

I believe Ares to have been once likewise a sun-god. 
The special home of his worship was warlike Macedon and 
Thrace. There can be no question, however, 
that in pre-historic times his worship was much 
more widely extended than we should suppose from reading 
Homer or the poets subsequent to Homer. Traces of his 
worship are to be found in the Zeus Areios at Elis, and in 
the Athenian Areopagus. But his natural home was in the 
North. He was the national divinity of the Thracians. 
And I have no doubt, as I have said, that he was once the 
sun-god of these Northern people, and only in later times 
became an abstraction, a god of war and valour. 

Another deity who was distinctly of Aryan origin was 

Demeter (Ceres), a name which is, as we have said, probably, 

^ A A A none other than Gemeter, ' mother earth.' She 
Demeter. 

is the Greek equivalent of the Prithvi of the 

Vedas. But whereas Prithvi has sunk into obscurity, 



DE METER. ill 



Demeter was associated with some of the most important 
rites of Greek religion. The association of ideas which, face 
to face with the masculine godhead, the sun or sky, placed 
the fruitful all-nourishing earth, is so natural as to find a 
place in almost every system. We have seen how the two 
formed a part of the Egyptian and Chaldsean mythologies. 
And we have seen that each branch of the Aryan folk carried 
away along with their sky- and sun-worship this earth-worship 
also. But among none of the different branches was the 
great nature-myth which always gathers round the earth- 
goddess, woven into a more pathetic story than by the 
Greeks. The story is that of the winter death or sleep of 
earth, or of all that makes earth beautiful and glad. And it 
was thus the Greeks told that world-old legend. Persephone 
(Proserpina), or Core, is the green earth, or the green verdure 
which may be thought the daughter of earth and sky. She 
is, indeed, almost the reduplication of Demeter herself; and 
in art it is not always easy to distinguish a representation as 
of one or of the other. At spring-time Persephone, a maiden, 
with her maidens, is wandering careless in the Nysian plain, 
plucking the flowers of spring, ' crocuses and roses and fair 
violets,' l when in a moment all is changed. Hades, regent 
of Hell, rises in his black-horsed golden chariot ; unheeding 
her cries, he carries her off to share his infernal throne and 
rule in the kingdoms of the dead. In other words, the 
awful shadow of death falls across the path of youth and 
spring, and Hades appears to proclaim the fateful truth that 
all spring-time, all youth and verdure, are alike with hoary 
age candidates for service in his Shadowy Kingdom. The 
sudden contrast between spring flowers and maidenhood 
and death gives a dramatic intensity to the scene and 
represents the quiet course of decay in one tremendous 
1 Homeric hymn to Dimeter. 



222 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

moment 1 To lengthen out the picture and show the slow 
sorrow of earth robbed of its spring and summer, Demeter 
is portrayed wandering from land to land in bootless search 
of her lost daughter. We know how deep a significance 
this story had in the religious thought of Greece ; how the 
representation of it composed the chief feature of the 
Eleusinian mysteries, and how these and other mysteries 
probably enshrined the intenser, more hidden feelings of 
religion, and continued to do so when mythology had lost 
its hold upon the popular mind. It is, indeed, a new- 
antique story, patent to all and fraught for all with solemnest 
meaning. So that this myth of the death of Proserpine has 
lived on in a thousand forms through all the Aryan systems. 
Persephone is one of the most characteristic of the 
maiden-goddesses of whom we spoke above. The most 
Athene and literal and material interpretation of her myth 
other god- would show her to be an embodiment of the 
desses. grain, which sinks into the ground when it is 
sown and springs up again to live above the earth for half 
the year. But in a wider sense I have no doubt that 
Persephone is meant to typify the spring of which the grain 
might well be a sort of symbol, or to typify vegetation 
generally. And this is one of the natural characters 
belonging to the maiden-goddess. She is very frequently 
a goddess of spring in some aspect or other — of spring as 
the season of beauty and love. Such is the Freyja of the 
Norse mythology; such, to some extent, are Aphrodite 
(Venus) and Artemis (Diana). 2 

There is, however, one divinity among the Greeks who 
seems to have a somewhat different character, and who 

1 See Appendix. Persephone and Balder. 

2 Albeit that Aphrodite like Athene is likewise a goddess sprung 
from water— from the sea. 



ATHENE AND OTHER GODDESSES. 223 

is so much more important a maiden-goddess than any of 
these that she at once springs into our thoughts when we 
are speaking of divinities of this class. I mean, of course, 
Athene (Minerva). But in the first place, the wide worship 
of Athene is partly accidental and due to her being the 
patroness of Athens ; in the second place, Athene has taken 
so many ethical characteristics, she is so advanced a 
conception of a divine being, that she is not at all a good 
representative of a religion in its early state. It would be 
rather confusing than otherwise to have to trace the 
character of Athene step by step out of the natural 
phenomenon from which she sprang. I will only say here 
that I believe her to have been originally born from the sea 
or from a river. She may once have actually been a 
goddess of water. Afterwards she became, I think, the 
goddess of the rivers of heaven or the clouds. And as the 
clouds hold the storm and the lightning, Athene is some- 
times a storm-goddess, sometimes a goddess of the lightning. 1 
Or again, she may be the heaven which bears the storm- 
cloud, the thundering heaven. We remember that Zeus 
and Athene each have the privilege of wearing the ^Egis — 
the dreadful fringed ^Egis, which is, I think, the lightning- 
bearing cloud. 

Artemis (Diana) is the moon-goddess, at least she is so 
in her character as sister of Apollo. But there were really 
many different Artemises in Greece. And very often she is 
a river-goddess. In the same way, there were many different 
Aphrodites. The more sensuous the character in which 
Aphrodite (Venus) appears, the more does she show her 
Asiatic birth ; and this was why the Greeks, when regarding 
her especially as the goddess of love, called her Cypris, or 
Cythersea, after Cyprus and Cythera, which had been in 
1 As she springs from the head of Zeus, the storm-cloud. 



224 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

ancient days stations for the Phoenician traders, and where 
they had first made acquaintance with the Greeks. Aphro- 
dite was the favourite goddess of these mariners, as, indeed, 
a moon-goddess well might be ; and it was they who gave 
her her most corrupt and licentious aspect. For she has 
not always this character even among the Phoenicians ; 
but oftentimes appears as a huntress, more like Artemis, or 
armed as a goddess of battle, like Athene. Doubtless, 
however, goddesses closely allied to Aphrodite or Artemis, 
divinities of productive nature and divinities of the moon, 
belonged to the other branches of the Indo-European 
family. The idea of these divinities was a common pro- 
perty; the exact being in whom these ideas found ex- 
pression varied with each race. 

If we travel from India and from Hellas to the cold 
North, the same characteristic features reappear. In the 

Teutonic religions, as we know them, 1 Odin has 
Sc ^ in o a ^ ian taken the place of the old Aryan sky-god, 

Dyaus. The last did, indeed, linger on in the 
Zio or Tyr of these systems ; but he had sunk from the 
position of a chief divinity. The change, however, is not 
great. The god chosen to fill his place resembles him as 
nearly as possible in character. Odin, or Wuotan, 2 whose 
name in its etymological meaning is probably the god who 
moves violently or rushes along, 3 was originally a god of 
the wind rather than of the atmosphere of heaven. Yet 

1 Our knowledge of Teutonic mythology is chiefly gathered from the 
Norsemen, and in fact almost exclusively from Icelandic literature. 
The most valuable source of all is the collection of sacred songs which 
generally goes by the name of Edda den sEldra, the Elder Edda. 

2 Odhinn is the Norse, Wuotan the German, Wodan or Wodin the 
English name. 

3 Or else the god who inspires. (See Corp. PoetBor.,1n\xo&., p. civ.) 



ODIN. 225 



along with this more confined part of his character, he bears 
almost all the attributes of the exalted sky-god, the Dyaus or 
Zeus ; only he adds to these some parts peculiar to a god 
of wind ; and we can easily understand how, as these Aryan 
people journeyed northwards, their wind-god grew in magni- 
tude and power. 

It was Odin who lashed into fury their stormy seas, and 
kept the impatient vikings (fjord-men) forced prisoners in 
their sheltered bays. He it was who rushed 
through their mountain forests, making the 
ancient pine-tops bend to him as he hurried on ; and men 
sitting at home over their winter fires, and listening to his 
howl, told one another how he was hastening to some 
distant battle-field, there to direct the issue, and to choose 
from among the fallen such heroes as were worthy to 
accompany him to Valhalla, the Hall of Bliss. 1 Long after 
the worship of Christ had overturned that of the ^Esir, 2 this, 
the most familiar and popular aspect of Odin's nature, lived 
on in the thoughts of men. In the Middle Ages the wind 
reappears in the legend of the Phantom Army, a strange 
apparition of two hosts of men seen to join battle in mid- 
air. The peasant of the Jura or the Alps could tell how, 
when alone upon the mountain-side, he had beheld the 
awful vision. Sometimes all the details of the fight were 
visible, but as though the combatants were riding in the 
air ; sometimes the sounds of battle only came from the 
empty space above, till at the end a shower of blood gave 
the fearful witness a proof that he was not the dupe of his 
imagination only. 3 In other places, especially, for example, 

1 Literally, ' The Hall of the Slain,' i.e. the hall of heroes. 

2 ^Esir, pi. of As or Ans, the general Norse name for a god. 

- One of the last appearances of such a phantom army is graphically 
described by Mr. Motley in his History of the Dutch Republic. The 
occasion was a short time before the battle of Mookerhyde, in which 

Q 



226 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

in the Harz mountains, the Phantom Army gave place to 
the Wild Huntsman. This phantom hunt has many 
different names in the different countries of Europe. With 
us it is known best under the name of Heme the Hunter 
or of Arthur's Chase. In Brittany this last name is also 
used. In the Harz and in other places in Germany the 
huntsman was called Hackelbarend or Hackelberg ; and the 
story went how he had been chief huntsman to the Duke of 
Brunswick, but for impiety or for some dreadful oath, like 
that which had brought vengeance on the famous Van der 
Decken, had been condemned to hunt for ever. through the 
clouds — for ever, that is, until the Day of Judgment. 1 All 

the army of Prince Louis of Nassau was defeated, and himself slain : — 
' Early in February five soldiers of the burgher guard at Utrecht, being 
on their midnight watch, beheld in the sky above them the representa- 
tion of a furious battle. The sky was extremely dark except directly 
over their heads, where for a space equal in extent to the length of the 
city, and in breadth to that of an ordinary chamber, two armies in battle 
array were seen advancing upon each other. The one moved rapidly 
up from the north-west, with banners waving, spears flashing, trumpets 
sounding, accompanied by heavy artillery and by squadrons of cavalry. 
The other came slowly forward from the south-east, as if from an 
entrenched camp, to encounter their assailants. There was a fierce 
action for a few moments, the shouts of the combatants, the heavy 
discharge of cannon, the rattle of musketry, the tramp of heavy-armed 
foot-soldiers, and the rush of cavalry being distinctly heard. The 
firmament trembled with the shock of the contending hosts, and was 
lurid with the rapid discharges of their artillery. . . . The struggle 
seemed but short. The lances of the south-eastern army seemed to 
snap 'like hempstalks,' while their firm columns all went down 
together in mass beneath the onset of their enemies. The overthrow 
was complete — victors and vanquished had faded ; the clear blue space, 
surrounded by black clouds, was empty, when suddenly its whole 
extent where the conflict had so lately raged was streaked with blood, 
flowing athwart the sky in broad crimson streaks ; nor was it till the 
five witnesses had fully watched and pondered over these portents that 
the vision entirely vanished.' (Vol. ii., p. 526.) 

1 The story of Van der Decken, the Flying Dutchman, is surely 



ODIN. 227 



the year through he pursues his way alone, and the peasants 
hear his holloa, mingled with the baying of his two dogs. 1 
But for twelve nights — between Christmas and the Twelfth- 
night — he hunts on the earth ; and if any door is left open 
during the night, and one of the two hounds runs in, he will 
bring misfortune upon that house. 

Besides this wilder aspect of his character, Odin appears 
as the heaven-god — all-embracing — the father of gods and 
men, like Zeus. 'All-father Odin' he is called, and his 
seat was on Air-throne ; thither every day he ascended and 
looked over Glad-home, the home of the gods, and over the 
homes of men, and far out beyond the great earth-girding 
sea, to the dim frost-bound giant-land on earth's border. 
And whatever he saw of wrong-doing and of wickedness 
upon the earth, that he set to rights ; and he kept watch 
against the coming of the giants over seas to invade the 
abode of man and the citadel of the gods. Only these last 
— the race of giants — he could not utterly subdue and 
exterminate; for Fate, which was stronger than all, had 
decreed that they should remain until the end, and only be 
overthrown at the Twilight of the Gods themselves. But 
of this myth, which was half-Christian, we have not space to 
speak at length here. 

In this picture of Odin we surely see a fellow-portrait to 
that of the ' wide-seeing ' Zeus. ' The eye of Zeus, which 
sees all things and knows all,' says one poet ; or again, as 

(more especially since its dramatization by Wagner) too well known to 
need relation. Van der Decken, or Dekken, seems to mean ' the man 
with the cloak ; ' he too is probably a changed form of Odin. 

1 It may be as well to say here that every detail of the legend is 
found upon a critical inquiry to be significant. His name Hackel- 
barend (cloak-bearer) connects him with Odin, the wind-god. His two 
dogs connect him with two dogs of Sanskrit mythology, also signifying 
the wind*. 



228 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

another says, 'Zeus is the earth, Zeus is the sky, Zeus is all, 
and that which is over all.' 

Behind Odin stands Tyr — of whom we have already 
spoken — and Thor and Balder, who are, or originally were, 
two different embodiments of the sun; Thor 
aird'BalcTr being also a £ oc * °f thunder. He is in character 
very closely allied to Heracles. He is the 
mighty champion, the strongest and most warlike of all 
the gods. But he is the friend of man and patron of agri- 
culture, 1 and as such the enemy of the giant-race, which 
represents not only cold and darkness, but. the barren, 
rugged, uncultivated regions of earth. Like Heracles, 
Thor is never idle, constantly with some work on hand, 
'faring eastward to fight Trolls (giants),' as the Eddas 
often tell us. In one of these expeditions he performs 
three labours, which may be paralleled from the labours 
of Heracles. He nearly drains the sea dry by drinking 
from a horn; this is the sun 'sucking up the clouds' 
from the sea, as people still speak of him as doing. It 
corresponds to the turning the course of the Alpheus and 
Peneus, which Heracles performs. Then he tries to lift (as 
he thinks) a large cat from the ground, but in reality he has 
been lifting the great mid-earth serpent (notice the fact that 
we have the sun at war with a serpent once more) which 
encircles the whole earth, and he has by his strength shaken 
the very foundations of the world. This is the same as the 
feat of Heracles in bringing up Cerberus from the under- 
world. And lastly, he wrestles, as he thinks, with an old 
woman, and is worsted ; but in reality he has been wrestling 
with Old Age or Death, from whom no one ever came off 
the victor. So we read in Homer that Heracles once 
wounded Hades himself, and 'brought grief into the land 
1 See Uhland, Der Mythus von Thor. 



TVR } THOR, AND BALDER. 229 

of shades,' and in Euripides' beautiful play, Alcestis, we 
see Heracles struggling, but this time victoriously, with 
Thanatos, Death himself. In these labours the Norse hero, 
though striving manfully, fails; but the Greek is always 
victorious. Herein lies a difference belonging to the 
character of the two creeds. 

Balder the Beautiful — the fair, mild Balder — represents 
the sun more truly than Thor does : the sun in his gentle 
aspect, as he would naturally appear to a Norseman. His 
house is Breidablik, ' Wide-glance,' that is to say, the bright 
upper air, the sun's home. He is like the son of Leto seen 
in his benignant aspect, the best beloved among gods, the 
brightener of their warlike life, beloved, too, by all things 
on earth, living and inanimate, and lamented as only the 
sun could be — the chief nourisher at life's feast. For, when 
Balder died, everything in heaven and earth, 'both all living 
things and trees and stones and all metals,' wept to bring 
him back again, ' as thou hast no doubt seen these things 
weep when they are brought from a cold place into a hot 
one.' A modern poet has very happily expressed the 
character of Balder, the sun-god, the great quickener of 
life upon earth. Balder is supposed to leave heaven to 
tread the ways of men, and his coming is the signal for 
the new birth, as of spring-time, in the sleeping world. 

' There is some divine trouble 

On earth and in air ; 
Trees tremble, brooks bubble, 

Ants loosen the sod, 
Warm footsteps awaken 

Whatever is fair, 
Sweet dewdrops are shaken 

To quicken each clod. 
The wild rainbows o'er him 

Are melted and fade, 
The light runs before him 

Through meadow and glade. 



230 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

Green branches close round him, 

Their leaves whisper clear — 
He is ours, we have found him, 

Bright Baldur is here.' 1 

The earth-mother of the Teutons was Frigg, the wife of 
Odin ; but perhaps when Frigg's natural character was for- 

Frigg, gotten, Hertha (Earth) became separated into 
Freyja, another personage. ' Odin and Frigg,' says the 

Fre y- Edda, 'divide the slain;' and this means that 
the sky-god received the breath, the earth-goddess the 
body. But on the whole Frigg plays an insignificant part 
in our late form of Teuton mythology. Closely related to 
her, as Persephone is related to Demeter, with a name 
formed out of hers, stands Freyja, the goddess of spring 
and beauty and love; for the Northern goddess of love 
might better accord with the innocence of spring than 
could the Phoenician Aphrodite. Freyja has a brother 
Freyr, who reduplicates her name and character, for he 
too is a sun-god or a god of spring. 

Very beautiful is the myth which reverses the sad story 
of Persephone (and of Balder), and tells of the barren earth 
wooed by the returning spring. Freyr one day mounted 
the seat of Odin which was called air-throne, and whence 
a god might look over all the ways of earth. And looking 
out into giant-land far in the north, he saw a light flash 
forth as the aurora lights up the wintry sky. 2 And looking 
again, he saw that a maiden wondrously beautiful had just 
opened her father's door, and that this was her beauty 
which shone out over the snow. Then Freyr left the air- 
throne and determined to send to the fair one and woo 

1 Baldur; a Song of Divine Death, by Robert Buchanan. 

2 This scarcely holds as a simile, for in fact the light is the aurora. 
It need hardly be said, therefore, that the comparison is not found in 
the original story. 



FRIGG, FREYJA, FREY. 231 

her to be his wife. Her name was Gerda. 1 Freyr sent 
his messenger Skirnir to carry his suit to Gerda ; and Skirnir 
told her how great Freyr was among the gods, how noble 
and happy a place was Asgard, the home of the gods. For 
all Skirnir's pleading Gerda would give no ear to his suit. 
But Freyr had given his magic sword (the sun's rays) to 
Skirnir ; and at last the ambassador, tired of pleading, drew 
that and threatened to take the life of Gerda unless she 
granted Freyr his wish. So she consented to meet him 
nine nights hence in the wood of Barri. The nine nights 
typify, it is thought, the nine winter months of the Northern 
year ; and the name of the wood, Barri, means ' the green ; ' 
the beginnings of spring in the wood being happily imaged 
as the meeting of the fresh and the barren earth. 

All the elements of nature were personified by the spirit 
of Aryan poetry, and it would be a hopeless task — weari- 
some and useless to the reader — to give a mere category 
of the nature-gods in each system. Those which had most 
influence upon their religious thought were they who have 
been mentioned, the gods of the sky and sun and mother- 
earth. The other elemental divinities were (as a rule) 
more strictly bound within the circle of their own do- 
minions. It is curious to trace the difference between 
these strictly polytheistic deities — coequal in their several 
spheres — and those others who arose in obedience to a 
wider ideal of a godhead. We have seen that the Indians 
had a strictly elemental heaven or sky, as well as their god 
Dyaus, and that they called him Varu^a, a word which 
corresponds etymologically to the Greek Ouranos, the 
heaven. In the later Indian mythology Varu^a came to 

1 I.e. Garc5r a general name for earth, expanded from the confined 
meaning* of inclosure, yard (allied to oIkos, hortus) ; just as yaia is 
connected with a cow-inclosure. 



232 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

stand, not for the sky, but for the wide expanse of ocean, 
and so corresponds to the Greek Poseidon, the Latin 
Neptune, and the Norse CEgir. All these were the gods 
of the sea and of all waters. The wind, as we saw, com- 
bined in the person of Odin with the character of a highest 
god ; but in the Greek the part was played by an inferior 
divinity, Hermes. In India there is a wind-god (called Vaja) ; 
but the character is likewise divided among a plurality 
of minor divinities, the Manits. Of Agni, the god of fire, 
corresponding to Hephaestus and Vulcan, we have spoken ; 
and in the North Fire is not a god at all, but an evil being 
called Loki. This is enough to show that the worship of 
Agni rose into fervour after the separation of the Aryan folk. 
We postpone to the next chapter the mention of the gods 
of the under-world. 

The religions of which we have been giving this slight 

sketch have been what we may call ' natural ' religions, that 

is to say, the thoughts about God and the 

, e . en Unseen world which without help of any special 
religion. m . . 

vision seem to spring up simultaneously in the 

minds of the different Aryan peoples. But one among the 
Aryan religions still in pre-historic times broke off abruptly 
from its relation with the others, and, under a teacher 
whom we may fairly call god-taught, in beauty and moral 
purity passed far beyond the rest. 

This was the Zoroastrian, the faith of the Iranian (ancient 
Persian) branch, or, as it is perhaps better called, the Zend 
or Mazdean religion • a creed which holds a pre-eminence 
among all the religions of antiquity, excepting alone that of 
the Hebrews. And that there is no exaggeration in such a 
claim is sufficiently witnessed by the inspired writings them- 
selves, in which the Persian kings are frequently spoken of 



THE ZEND RELIGION. 233 

as if they as much as the Hebrews were worshippers of 
Jehovah. ' Cyrus the servant of God,' ' The Lord said 
unto my lord (Cyrus),' are constantly recurring expressions 
in Isaiah. 

In some respects this Zoroastrianism seems to stand in 
violent opposition to the Aryan religion. Nevertheless, at 
the back of the religion of the Zend Avesta, which is the 
sacred book of the Iranian creed, we can (as was before 
hinted) trace the outline of an earlier natural religion 
essentially the same— so far as we can judge — with the 
religion of the Vedas. And upon the whole we should be 
disposed to say that Zoroastrianism appears to be not much 
else than a higher development of that earlier system. 
At any rate, we may feel sure that the older system was 
before the coming of the ' gold bright ' 1 reformer, essentially 
a polytheism with only some yearnings towards monotheism, 
and that Zoroaster settled it upon a firmly monotheistic 
basis. This very fact leaves us little to say about the 
Iranian system considered strictly as a religion. For when 
once nations have risen to the height of a monotheism there 
can be little essential difference in their beliefs ; such 
difference as there is will be in the conception they have of 
the character of their gods, whether it be a high, a relatively 
high, or relatively low one ; and this again is more perhaps 
a question of moral development than of religion. Their 
one god, since he made all things and rules all things, 
cannot partake of the exclusive nature of any natural 
phenomenon; he cannot be a god of wind or water, of 

1 The meaning of Zoroaster, or rather Zarathustra, his true name. 
The reader may usefully consult M. James Darmesteter's Zend Avesta 
{Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv. ), in which he will see how much of 
this religion is (in the opinion of M. Darmesteter) simply an early nature- 
religion parallel to that of the Vedas. 



234 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

sun or sky. The Zoroastrian creed did afterwards in- 
troduce (then for the first time in the world's history) a 
very important element of belief, namely, of the distinct 
origin, and almost if not quite equal powers, of the good 
and evil principles. But this was later than the time of 
Zarathustra. 

The name which Zarathustra taught the people to give to 
the one god was unconnected with Aryan nature-names, 
Dyaus, or Varu?za, or Indra. He simply called him the 
' Great Spirit,' or, in the Zend, Ahura-mazda ; x in later 
Persian, Hormuzd or Ormuzd. He is the all-perfect, all- 
wise, all-powerful, all-beautiful. He is the creator of all 
things. And — still nearer to the Christian belief — before 
the creation of the world, by means whereof the world itself 
was made, existed the Word. Some trace of this same 
doctrine of the pre-existing Word {Hanover, in the Zoro- 
astrian religion) is to be found in the Vedas, where he is 
called Vach. It would be here impossible to enter into an 
examination of the question how far these early religions 
seem to shadow forth the mystical doctrine of the Logos. 
The evil principle opposed to Ormuzd is Angra-Mainyus 
(Ahrimanes), but in the true doctrine he is by no means 
the equal of God, no more so than is Satan. The successive 
corruption of pure Zoroastrianism after the time of its 
founder is marked by a constant exaggeration of the 
power of the evil principle (suggested, perhaps, by inter- 
course with devil-worshipping nations of a lower type) until 
Ahrimanes becomes the rival of Ormuzd, coequal and co- 
eternal with him. 

Such is the simple creed of the Persians, accompanied of 
course by rites and ceremonies, part invented by the re- 
former, part inherited from the common Aryan parentage. 
1 Hence the name Mazdean applied to this creed. 



THE ZEND RELIGION. 235 

It is well known that the Persians built no temples, but 
worshipped Ormuzd chiefly upon the mountain-tops ; that 
they paid great respect to all the elements — that is to air, 
water, and fire, the latter most of all — a belief which 
they shared with their Indian brethren, but stopped far 
short of worshipping any. That they held very strongly 
the separate idea of the soul, so that when once a body 
had lost its life, they considered it to be a thing wholly 
corrupt and evil ; a doctrine which carried in the germ that 
of the inherent evil of matter, as the philosophical reader 
will discern. 

It remains to say something of their religious books. The 
Zend Avesta was supposed to comprise the teaching of 
Zoroaster, and was believed to have been written by him. 
Only one complete book has been preserved — it is called the 
Vendidad. The Zend language in which the Avesta is written 
is the oldest known form of Persian, older than that in use at 
the time of Darius the Great ; but this is no proof that it 
dates back to the days of Zarathustra. Part of it is in prose 
and part in verse, and as in every literature we find that the 
fragments of verse are they which survive the longest, it has 
been conjectured that the songs of the Zend Avesta (Gathas 
they are called) may even have been written by the great 
reformer himself. 



CHAPTER X. 

THE OTHER WORLD. 

If the sun-god was so natural a type of a man-like divinity, 
a god suffering some of the pains of humanity, a sort of type 

The death of man's own ideal life here, it was natural that 
of the men should question this oracle concerning their 

sun-god. m t ure iif e an d their hopes beyond the grave. We 
have seen that the Egyptians did so ; seen how they watched 
the course of the day-star, and, beholding him sink behind 
the sandy desert, pictured a home of happiness beyond that 
waste, a place to be reached by the soul after many trials 
and long wandering in the dim Amenti-land which lay 
between. The Aryans dwelt, we believe, upon the slopes 
of the Hindoo-Koosh or in the level plain beneath ; and, if 
the conjecture be reasonable that a great part of the land 
now a sandy desert was then filled by an inland sea, 1 many 
of them must have dwelt upon its borders and seen the sun 
plunge in its wave each evening. Then or afterwards they 
saw this, and interpreted what they saw in the very thought 
of Milton : — 

* Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more, 
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, 
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. 
So sinks the day-star in the ocean-bed, 

1 See Chapter IV., p. ioo. 



LIFE IN THE TOMB— THE "DOUBLE." 237 

And yet anon repairs his drooping head, 

And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore 

Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.' 

And thus a belief grew up among them that after death their 
souls would have to cross this ocean to some happy paradise 
which lay beyond in the ' home of the sun.' 

But there is another idea, more simple and material than 
this, and therefore more natural to human nature in all its 
phases. This is the notion that the dead man jjfe in the 
abides in his tomb, that he comes to life in it tomb. The 
after a certain fashion, and lives a new life double. 
there not greatly different from his life on earth, only calmer 
and more stately — 

' Calm pleasures there abide, majestic pains.' 

First of all, perhaps, the survivors are content to think of 
the dead man as simply living in his underground house. 
To prevent him coming out thence, the stone-age men, we 
noticed, scattered shards, flints, and pebbles, before the mouth 
of the house. To that tomb they brought their offerings of 
meat and drink. The notion of the soul is not yet separated 
from that of the body. But that does not show that all the 
ideas of those who confounded the two were purely material- 
istic. In common parlance we often confound spiritual and 
material things quite as much ; and yet in our thoughts we 
have the power of separating them. We talk of a good- 
hearted man, and yet we can distinguish between the 
purely imaginary or spiritual entity here meant by * heart/ 
and the mere physical organ. I do not say that early man 
could have distinguished between the idea of the dead body 
and the surviving soul. Probably he could not. I only say 
that we are not to judge of his belief merely by his rites 
and ceremonies. 



238 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

So far as these ceremonies go, man began, we judge, by 
thinking first of securing for the dead an everlasting habita- 
tion. And so he covered his grave with an immense pile 
of earth. 1 The pile grew greater and greater, and at last, as 
we saw, it took the shape of the pyramid. Then came the 
entrance-chamber or porch to the tomb, in which the 
survivors offered sacrifices to the dead to keep him alive 
by the smell of the burnt offering. 

The Egyptians had very little power of abstracting the 
idea of the immaterial soul from the material dead body. 
At any rate, they did not (for a long time) conceive the soul 
as a purely immaterial being. They thought of the im- 
mortal part of man as a sort of double of the mortal part. 
This double they called his ka. The ka could not exist 
without some material form, and therefore they took 
infinite pains to provide it with a body of some kind. They 
mummified the dead body so as to make it last as long as 
possible. But besides that, they made numerous images of 
the dead ; sometimes (if his state could afford it) large 
statues of wood 2 or stone. And in addition to these they 
made a vast number of smaller images, generally of pottery 
— those little mummy figures in blue or green pottery, 3 of 
which we find such endless quantities buried in the tombs. 

1 Or the graves of those whom he desired specially to honour. We 
can guess at the process of his thought pretty well. First, the body is 
buried deep, or earth is thrown over it in a heap, to keep it from being 
torn up by wild beasts. Then as the covering of the body gets to be 
thought a special insurance of vitality to the soul, the practice is 
exaggerated more and more until we get the great grave-mounds and 
the pyramids. 

2 Wooden statues were very common in the earliest Egyptian dynasties. 
But they belong to these only. 

3 Blue or green is the colour of Osiris, who represents the soul. (See 
Chapter VII.) 



THE JOURNEY OF THE DEAD. 239 

There was usually a secret chamber or passage practised 
in the tomb to contain these mummied figures, and it was 
so arranged that the scent of the sacrifice might come 
along it. 1 

All these ideas belong, we see, to the most stationary 
notion of the dead. If they were followed out logically, the 
soul would be considered as tied for ever to the mummy, 
which lies below in a dark chamber, or to the little images 
in their small passage within the wall of the tomb. But 
the Egyptians did not carry out this idea logically. For we 
find prayers upon the walls of their earliest tombs, that 
Osiris should give to the dead, sheep, oxen, and farm- 
labourers, and * sport,' or corn, and wine, and dancers, and 
jesters — all the pleasures, in fact, which he had had in life. 
Therefore the dead must really have been thought to have the 
power of life and motion as he had enjoyed it upon earth, 
inconsistent as such an idea is with the constant enchain- 
ment of the ka to some material belonging, to the mummy 
or to the image of pottery. 

Wherefore it came about that the Egyptians began to 
have a sort of notion of two souls — one the half-material ka, 
which remained in the tomb ; the other of an 
immaterial nature, which moved about. of the°dead y 

But this notion of two souls arose because the 
Egyptians were more precise and logical than most peoples 
have been in their speculations as to the future state. 
Among other races we see a constant confusion between 
the idea of resting in the tomb, and the idea of journeying 
to another land generally in the wake of the sun. And the 
food and drink placed on the tomb, instead of being the 

1 The Egyptian tombs having generally an upper chamber for the 
sacrifices or funeral feasts, and a chamber in the earth beneath for the 
mummy, 



240 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

simple nourishment of the dead, were designed merely as a 
temporary provision for him on his way to the land of 
souls. 

The expectation of a journey after death to reach the 
home of shades is all but universal ; and the opinion that 
the home of the departed lies in the west is of an almost 
equally wide extension. The Egyptian religion, with its 
wonderful Book of the Dead, gives as much weight to 
this side of belief as to the other notion of resting in the 
tomb. To lengthen out the soul's journey, which was 
fancied to last thousands of years, and give incident where 
all must have been really imaginary, the actual journey of 
the mummy to its resting-place was lengthened after life to 
portray the more ghostly wanderings of the spirit. As a 
rule, the cities of the living in Egypt lay upon the eastern 
bank of the Nile ; the tombs, the cities of the dead, on the 
left or western bank, generally just within the borders of the 
desert. Wherefore, as the body was carried across the Nile 
to be buried in the desert, so the soul was believed to begin 
his journey in the dim twilight region of Apap, king of the 
desert, to cross a river more than once, to advance towards 
the sun, light gradually breaking upon him the while, until 
at last he enters the 'Palace of the Two Truths/ the 
judgment-hall of Osiris (the sun). Last of all, he walks 
into the sun itself, or is absorbed into the essence of the 
deity. 

In these two notions we have, I think, the germ of almost 
all the most ancient belief touching the soul's future. A 
confusion between the two notions would imagine the soul 
making a journey through the earth to an underground 
land of shades. So far as we know, this was the pre- 
vailing feeling among the Hebrews. Old Hebrew writers 
(with whom the hopes of immortality were not strong) speak 



THE OTHER WORLD OF THE ARYANS. 241 

of going down into the grave, 1 a place thought of as a misty, 
dull, unfeeling, almost .unreal abode. 

Finally, a third element — if not universal, common cer- 
tainly to the Aryan races — will be the conception of the 
soul separating from the body altogether and 
mounting upwards to some home in the sky. ?^ rn ? r 
All these elements are found to exist and 
coexist in early creeds, and the force of the component 
parts determines the colour of man's doctrine about the 
other world. 

Among all the Aryan peoples the Greeks seem to have 
turned their thoughts farthest away from the contemplation 
of the grave ; and though the voice of wonder The other 
and imagination could not quite be silent upon world of the 
so important a question, Hades and the king- Ar y ans - 
dom of Hades filled a disproportionately small space in 
their creed. They shrank from images of Death, and 
adorned their tombs or cinerary urns with wreaths of flowers 
and figures of the dancing Hours : it is doubtful if the god 
Thanatos (Death) has ever been pictured by Greek art. 2 
And from what they have left on record concerning Hades 
and the realms of death, it is evident that they regarded it 

1 Sheol is the Hebrew word generally translated 'grave' in our 
version. Very different from the teaching of modern religion is the 
following passage : — 

' Sheol shall not praise the Jehovah, 
The dead shall not celebrate Thee : 

They that go down into the pit shall not hope for Thy truth. 
The living, the living, shall praise Thee as I do this day.' 

(Isa. xxxviii. 18, 19.) 

2 Still, this effect of their art on us may arise from the disappearance of 
some monuments which had a very different character, e.g. the campo 
santo .pictures, as we may call them, of Polygnotus at Delphi. (See 
Pausanias, x. 28.) 

R 



242 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

chiefly from its merely negative side, in that aspect which 
corresponds most exactly to the notion of a dark subter- 
raneous kingdom, and not to that of a journey to some 
other distant land. The etymology of their mythical King 
of Souls corresponds, too, with the same notions. Hades 
means nothing else than A-eides, the unseen. And when 
it was said that the dead had gone to Hades, all that was 
literally meant was that it had gone to the unseen place. 
But later on, the place became personified into the grim 
deity whom we know in Greek mythology, the brother of 
Zeus and Poseidon, he to whose share fell, in the partition 
of the world, the land of perpetual night. The under- 
world pictured by Homer is just of that voiceless, sightless 
character which accords with the name of Hades. Even 
the great heroes lose almost their identity, and all the joy 
and interest they had in life. To ' wander mid shadows a 
shadow, and wail by impassable streams,' is henceforward 
their occupation. 

Not that the Greek had no idea of another world of the 
more heavenly sort; ideas obtained as a joint inheritance 
with their brother nations; only their thoughts and their 
poetry do not often centre round such pictures. Their 
Elysian fields are a western sun's home, just after the 
pattern of the Egyptian ; and so are their Islands of the Blest, 
where, according to one tradition, the just Rhadamanthus 
had been transported when he fled from the power of his 
brother Minos. 1 Only, observe, there is this difference 
between these Paradises and the Egyptian house of Osiris — 
the latter was reached across the sandy desert, the former are 

1 The reason why the ' blameless Ethiopians ' were honoured by 
name and by the company of the gods, is most likely to be found in 
the fact of their living, as Homer thought, so near the western border 
of the world. 



THE RIVER OF DEATH. 243 

separated by the ocean from the abode of men. These are 
the Heavens of the Greek mythology ; while the realm of 
Hades — or later on the realm Hades — might by contrast be 
called their Hell. Let us look a little nearer at this heaven- 
picture. 

The Caspian Sea — or by whatever name we call the great 
mediterranean sea which lay before them— would be natur 
ally, almost inevitably, considered by the Aryans 

from their home in Bactria to bound the habit- T ^ Rlver 
'.,'•..,„,,., of Death. 

able world. The region beyond its borders 

would be a twilight-land like the land of Apap (the desert- 
king) of the Egyptians ; and still farther away would lie the 
bright region of the sun's proper home. And these ideas 
would be both literal — cosmological conceptions, as we 
should call them — and figurative, or at least mythical, re- 
ferring to the future state of the soul. The beautiful ex- 
pression of the Hebrew for that twilight western region, 
* the valley of the shadow of death,' might be used for the 
Apap-land in its figurative significance, and not the less 
justly because there creeps in here the other notion of death 
as of a descending to the land of shades, for the two ideas 
of the western heaven and the subterraneous hell were never 
utterly separated, but, among the Aryans at any rate, con- 
stantly acted and reacted upon one another. So with the 
Greeks we have as a cosmological conception — or let us 
say, more simply, a part of their world-theory — the encircling 
river Oceanus, with the dim Cimmerian land beyond ; and 
we have the Elsyian fields and the islands of the blest for the 
most happy dead. And then by a natural transfer of ideas 
the bounding river becomes the river of death — Styx and 
Lethe — and is placed below the earth in the region of death. 
Even ,the Elysian fields at last suffer the same change : they 
too pass below the earth. 



244 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

The Indian religion, too, has its river of death. ' On the 
fearful road to Yama's door,' says a hymn, 'is the terrible 
stream Vaitaram, in order to cross which I sacrifice a black 
cow.' 1 

This river of death must be somehow crossed. . The 
Greeks, we know, had their grim ferryman. 

* Portitor has horrendus aquas et flumina servat 
Terribili squalore Charon : cui plurima mento 
Canities inculta jacet ; stant lumina flamma,' etc. 

The Indians crossed their river of death by a bridge, 
which was guarded by two dogs, not less terrible to evil- 
doers than Charon and Cerberus. 

' A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches there, a path 
untrodden by men, a path I know of. 

1 On it the wise, who had known Brahma, ascend to the 
dwellings of Svarga, when they have received their dis- 
missal.' 2 So sings a poet. 

Swarga is the Bright Land (svar, to shine), i.e. the Home of 
the Sun. The names of the two guardian dogs, too, are 
interesting. They are the sons of that Sarama whom we 
have already seen sent by Indra to recover his lost cattle, 
whose name signifies the breeze of morning. Sarama's two 
sons, the dogs of Yama, being so closely connected with 
the god of the under-world — as Sarama is with Indra the 
sun-god — might be guessed as the winds of evening or, more 
vaguely, the evening, as Sarama is the morning. They are 
so ; and by their name of Sarameyas, are even more closely 
related to Hermes than Sarama was. 3 We now know why 
to Hermes was allotted the office of Psychopomp, or leader 
of the shades to the realm of Hades — or at least we partly 

1 Weber, in Chamb. 1020. 2 Vrhadarawyaka, Ed. Pol., iii. 4-7. 

8 According to the proper laws of change from Sanskrit to Greek, 
Sarameyas ='Ep/ieias, 'Ep^-fts. 



THE HEAVENWARD JOURNEY. 245 

know ; for we see that he is the same with the two dogs of 
Yama in the Indian myth. But they are also connected 
by name with another much more infernal being, Cerberus. 
Their individual names were Cerbura 1 the spotted, and 
Syama the black. Thus the identity of nature is confirmed 
by the identity of name. 

Death and Sleep are twin-brothers, and we need not be 
surprised to find the Sarameyas, or rather a god Sarameyas, 
addressed as a sort of god of sleep, a divine hound, the 
protector of the sleeping household, as we do find in a 
very beautiful poem of the Rig-Vedas. 2 

' Destroyer of sickness, guard of the house ; oh, thou who takest all 

shapes, be to us a peace-bringing friend. 
Bay at the robber, Sarameyas, bay at the thief; why bayest thou at the 

singer of Indra ? why art thou angry with me ? sleep, Sarameyas. 
The mother sleeps, the father sleeps, the dog sleeps, the clan-father 3 

sleeps, the whole clan sleeps ; sleep thou, Sarameyas. 
Those who sleep by the cattle, those who sleep by the wain, the 

women who lie on the couches, the sweet-scented ones, all these 

we bring to slumber.' 

How these verses breathe of the fragrant air of early pastoral 

life ! In their names, again, of ' black ' and ' spotted' it is 

very probable that the dogs typified two appearances of 

night — black or starry. 

And yet we must remember that Hermes is not a god of 

night, or sleep, but strictly and properly of the wind, and 

that his name, as that of Sarameyas, bears this 

L rr,, j t_ The heaven- 

meaning in its construction. The god who ward j ourney# 

bore away the souls to the other world, how- 
ever connected with the night, ' the proper time for dying,' 
must have been originally the wind. And in this we see 

1 Wilson, As. Res., iii. 409. 2 vii. 6, 15. 

* Father of the ' family ' in its larger sense. (See the chapter on 
Early Social Life.) 



246 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

an exquisite appropriateness. The soul is, in its original 
and literal meaning, the breath 1 — 'the spirit does but 
mean the breath.' What more natural, therefore, than 
that the spirit should be carried away by the wind-god? 
This was peculiarly an Aryan idea. Yet let it not be laid 
to the Aryans' charge, as though their theories of the soul 
and future life were less spiritual than those of other nations : 
quite the contrary was the case. So far as they abandoned 
the notion of the existence of the body in another state and 
transferred the future to the soul, their ideas became higher, 
and their pictures of the other world more amplified. But 
how, it may be asked, did the Aryans pass to their more 
spiritual conception of the soul ? The more external causes 
of this progress it is worth while briefly to trace. 

The sun, it has been said, acted powerfully upon men's 
minds in pointing the hopes of futurity. And in sketching 
the sun-myth which lay concealed in the story of the life of 
Heracles, we noticed one feature which suggests thoughts 
about a not yet mentioned element in the funeral rites of the 
Aryans. The fiery setting of the sun would itself suggest a 
fiery funeral, and pre-eminently so to a race who seem to 
have been addicted more than any other to this form of 
interment. Balder, the Northern sun-god, likewise receives 
such a funeral, and this more even than the death of He- 
racles exemplifies the double significance of the sun's wester- 
ing course. For he sails away upon a burning ship. When, 
therefore, this fire-burial was thoroughly established in 
custom as the most heroic sort of end, it is not likely that 
men would longer rely upon their belief that the body con- 
tinued in an after-life. The thought of the dead man living 
in his grave or travelling thence to regions below must, or 
should, by the consistent be definitely abandoned. In place 
1 jJwx^j spiritus, Geist, ghost, all from the notion of breathing. 



THE HEAVENWARD JOURNEY. 247 

of it, a theory of the vital faculty residing in the breath, 
which almost amounts to a soul distinct from the body, is 
accepted. Or, if the doubting brethren still require some 
visible representation of this vital power, the smoke 1 of the 
funeral pyre may typify the ascending soul. Nay, it would 
appear as though inanimate things likewise had some 
such essence, which by the fire could be separated from 
their material form. For what would formerly have been 
placed with the dead in the grave is now placed upon the 
pyre. In the funeral of Patroclus (//. xxiii.) we have a 
complete picture of these reformed rites, which seems to 
be applicable to all the Aryan folk; nor surely could we 
wish for anything more striking and impressive. The fat 
oxen and sheep are slain before the pyre, and with the fat from 
their bodies and with honey the corpse is liberally anointed. 
Then twelve captives are sacrificed, to the manes of the 
hero; they and his twelve favourite dogs are burnt with 
him upon the pile. We soon see the reason for the 
anointing of the corpse with fat, and taking so much pains 
that it should be thoroughly consumed. It was necessary 
for the peace of the shade that his body should be 
thoroughly burned; for the funeral ceremony was looked 
upon as the inevitable portal to Hades; without it the 
ghost still lingered upon earth unable to cross the Stygian 
stream. So afterwards, when the pile will not burn, 
Achilles prays to the North and the West Winds and 
pours libations to them that they may come and consummate 
the funeral rite. All night as the flame springs up Achilles 
stands beside it, calling upon the name of his friend and 

1 tyvxh Se KOT& x e °ris, T]vre icairvds, 

<pXeTo. (77. xxiii. 1 00.) 

'And to its home beneath the earth like smoke 
His soul went down.' 



248 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

watering the ground with libations from a golden cup. 
Toward morning the flame sinks down ; and then the two 
winds, according to the beautiful language of mythology, 
return homeward across the Thracian sea. 

All the Aryan nationalities practised cremation in some 
form or other, or had practised it; most only gave it up 
upon the introduction of Christianity. The time is too 
remote, therefore, to say when this form of interment was 
in truth a novelty; and the fact that the bronze age in 
Europe is, as distinguished from that of stone, a corpse- 
burning age, is one of the reasons which urge us to the 
conclusion that the bronze-using invaders were of the Aryan 
family. 1 The Indians, owing to their excessive reverence 
for Agni the fire-god, adhered to the practice most faith- 
fully ; though the very same reason (namely, their regard 
for the purity of fire) made the reformed Iranian religion 
utterly repudiate it — a fact which might seem strange did we 
not know how Zoroastrianism was sometimes governed by a 
spirit of opposition to the older faith. 2 Among the Norse- 
men about the time of the introduction of Christianity into 

1 The suggestion of Grimm (Ueber das Verb, der Leicken), that 
burying may have been used by an agricultural people, by those who 
were wont to watch the sown seed spring into new life, whereas 
burning is the custom of shepherd races, is not supported by a wide 
survey of the facts. The Aryans were not essentially pastoral, on the 
whole less so than the Turanian people who buried (see Herod., I. 4, 
for the Scythians), and less so again than the Semites, who did the 
same. 

2 The Vendidad relates how after that Auramazda had created sixteen 
perfect localities upon earth, Ahrimanes came after (like the sower of 
tares), and did what in him lay to spoil the paradises, by introducing 
all sorts of noxious animals and other abominations, such as the practice 
of burning the dead body or giving it to the water. The Iranians, as is 
well known, suspended their dead upon a sort of grating, and left them 
to be devoured of wild birds. 



OTHER WORLD OF THE NORSEMEN. 249 

Scandinavia, Burn ? or Bury ? became a test-question, and a 
constant cause of dispute between the rival creeds. 

In the Northern religion, too, therefore, we have the same 
leading ideas which we have signalized in the Indian or 
Grecian systems. Especially does that notion other world 
of the breath of the body, or the smoke of the of the 
funeral pyre representing the soul of the hero Norsemen. 
and carried upward under care of the wind, come pro- 
minently forward. This might be expected because, it will 
be remembered, the wind in the Northern mythology is not, 
as with the Indians, a servant of Yama only, or as with the 
Greeks a lesser divinity, but is the first of all the gods. To 
Odin is assigned the task of collecting the souls of heroes 
who had fallen in battle ; and there are few myths more 
poetical than that which pictures him riding to battle-fields 
to execute his mission. He is accompanied by his Val- 
kyriur, 'the choosers,' a sort of Amazonian houris, half 
human, half-godlike, who ride through the air in the form 
of swans; wherefore they — who are originally, perhaps, the 
clouds — are often called in the Eddas, Odin's swan-maidens. 
It has been said that this myth lived on in after-ages in the 
form of the Phantom Army and Heme the Hunter : and the 
essential part of it, the myth of the soul carried away by 
the wind, lived on more obscurely in a hundred other tales, 
some of which we may glance at in our next chapter upon 
Mythology. But while this idea of the mounting soul is 
often clearly expressed — as, for instance, where in Beowulf, 1 
in the last scene, the hero is burnt by the seashore, it is 

1 Beowulf, the oldest poem in our language (in Early English), is 
considered to have been written somewhere about a.d. 700. It relates, 
the adventures of a prince of Jutland or of Southern Sweden. Though, 
made and sung in a Christian country, it breathes the spirit of an earlier 
(heathen) time, as the instance of the burning of Beowulf alone would 
testify. 



250 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

said of him that he wand to wolcum, ' curled to the clouds,' 
imaging well the curling smoke of the pyre — there still 
lingered on other ideas of the death-home, a subterraneous 
land (Helheim, Hel's home) ruled over by the goddess 
Hel, 1 and an infernal Styx-like stream, with the bridge of 
Indian mythology transferred to the lower world. And so 
much were the three distinct ideas interwoven, that in the 
myth of Balder each one may be traced. For here the 
sun-god, who is the very origin and prototype of the two 
more exalted elements of the creed of the heavenward 
journey, 2 has himself to stoop downward to the gates of Hel. 
If this legend sanctified for the heathens the practice of fire- 
burial, they had certainly so much excuse for their obstinate 
adherence to the older custom, as one of the most beautiful 
myths ever told might plead for them. We may look upon 
the story of the death and burning of Balder in two aspects 
— first as an image of the setting sun, next as an expression 
of men's thoughts concerning death, and the course of the 
soul to its future home. If in this latter respect the story 
seems to mix up two different myths concerning the other 
world, we need not be surprised at that. 

Balder dies, as the sun dies each day, and as the summer 
dies into winter. He falls, struck by a dart from the hand 
of his blind brother Hodr (the darkness), and the shadow 
of death appears for the first time in the homes of Asgard. 
At first the gods knew not what to make of it, ' they were 
struck dumb with horror,' says the Edda ; 3 but seeing that 

1 Hel, from kelja, * to conceal,' answered identically to Hades. 

2 This heavenward journey may be described as at first a haven- ward 
one (i.e. across the sea) ; later as a really heavenward one through the 
air, with the wind-god. 

3 This is the Younger, or Prose Edda, of Snorro (Daemisaga 49), not 
that called the Edda of Ssemund — the Elder Edda. Undoubtedly the 
myth of Balder is largely infused with Christian elements. 



OTHER WORLD OF THE NORSEMEN. 251 

he is really dead, they prepare his funeral pyre. They took 
his ship Hringhorni (Ringhorn, the disk of the sun), and on 
it set a pile of wood, with Balder's horse and his armour, 
and all that he valued most, to which each god added some 
worthy gift. And when Nanna, the wife of Balder, saw the 
preparations, her heart broke with grief, and she too was 
laid upon the pile. Then they set fire to the ship, which 
sailed out burning into the sea. 

But Balder himself had to go to Helheim, the dark abode 
beneath the earth, where reigns Hel, 1 the goddess of the 
dead. Then Odin sends his messenger, Hermodr, to the 
goddess, to pray her to let Balder return once more to 
earth. For nine days and nine nights Hermodr rode 
through dark glens, so dark that he could not discern any- 
thing until he came to the river Gjoll ('the sounding' — 
notice that here the Greek Cocytus reappears), over which 
he rode by Gj oil's bridge, which was pleasant with bright 
gold. A maiden sat there keeping the bridge; she in- 
quired of him his name and lineage — for, said she, ' Yes- 
tereve five bands of dead men rid over the bridge, yet they 
did not shake it so much as thou hast done. But thou hast 
not death's hue upon thee ; why, then, ridest thou here on 
fie way to Hel?' 

' I ride to Hel,' answered Hermodr, ' to seek Balder. 
Hast thou perchance seen him pass this way ? ' 

1 Balder,' answered she, ' hath ridden over Gj oil's bridge. 
But yonder, northward, lies the road to Hel.' 

Hermodr then rode into the palace, where he found his 
brother Balder filling the highest place in the hall, and in 

1 Hel, in Norse mythology, is a person, the regent of Helheim. 
Just in the same way Hades is in Homer always a god, never a place. 
The idea concerning Helheim seems to have been that all who were 
not slain in battle went to its dark shore. 



252 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

his company he passed the night. The next morning he 
besought Hel, that she would let Balder ride home with 
him, assuring her how great the grief was among the gods. 

Hel answered, ' It shall now be proved whether Balder 
be so much loved as thou sayest. If, therefore, all things 
both living and lifeless weep for him, then shall he return. 
But if one thing speak against him or refuse to weep, he 
shall be kept in Helheim.' 

And when Hermodr had delivered this answer, the gods 
sent off messengers throughout the whole world, to tell 
everything to weep, in order that Balder might be delivered 
out of Helheim. All things freely complied with this 
request, both man and every other living thing, and earths, 
and stones, and trees, and metals, just as thou hast no doubt 
seen these things weep when they are brought from a cold 
place into a hot one. As the messengers were returning, 
and deemed that their mission had been successful, they 
found an old hag, named Thokk, 1 sitting in a cavern, and 
her they begged to weep Balder out of Helheim. But she 
said : — 

' Thokk will wail Nought quick or dead 

With dry eyes For carl's son care I. 

Balder's bale-fire. Let Hel hold her own.' 

So Balder remained in Helheim. 

Such was the sad conclusion of the myth of which the 
memory is kept up even in these days. For in Norway and 
Sweden — nay, in some parts of Scotland, the bale-fires 
celebrating the bale or death of the sun-god are lighted on 

1 i.e. Dokkr, dark. She sits in a cave, because both day and night 
are imagined as coming from a cave. So Shelley sings — 
* Swiftly walk over the western cave, 
Spirit of Night, 
Out of thy misty eastern cave.' 



OTHER WORLD OF THE NORSEMEN. 253 

the day when the sun passes the highest point in the ecliptic. 
Balder will not, said tradition, remain for ever in Helheim. 
A day will come, the twilight of the gods, when the gods 
themselves will be destroyed in a final victorious contest 
with the evil powers. And then, when a new earth has 
arisen from the deluge which destroys the old, Balder, the 
god of Peace, will come from Death's home to rule over this 
regenerate world. A sublime myth — if indeed it can be 
called a myth. 



CHAPTER XI. 

MYTHOLOGIES AND FOLK-TALES. 

If we found it difficult to reduce to a consistent simplicity 
the religious ideas of the Aryan races, what hope have we 

to find any thread through the labyrinth of 
f lver ^ y their unbridled imagination in dealing with 

more fanciful subjects ? The world is all before 
them where to choose ; nature, in her multitudinous works 
and ever-changing shows, is at hand to give breath to the 
faculty of myth-making, and lay the foundation of all the 
stories which have ever been told. The two elements 
concurrent to the manufacture of mythologies are the 
varying phenomena in nature, and that which is called 
the anthropomorphic (personifying) faculty in man. I do 
not mean by this that all myths represent natural appear- 
ances. Some simply relate events, real human experiences ; 
all that is mythic about such stories is that they are mis- 
placed. Some one has gone through the adventures, but 
not the person of whom they are told. Other tales transfer 
in a like fashion human experiences to beings who are not 
human, to animals, to trees and streams, maybe even to 
implements, to spades and ploughs, to hatchets, swords, 
or ships. All these may be subject of mere tale-telling. 



DIVERSITY OF MYTHS. 255 

But what T understand by mythology are the stories related 
of the gods — at all events, stories of supernatural beings who 
are almost gods. And among the Aryan folk, as the gods 
are in almost every instance the personifications of phe- 
nomena or powers of nature, the myths of widest extension 
were necessarily occupied with these. 

Religion being the greatest concern of man, the myths 
which allied themselves most closely to his religious ideas 
would be those which maintained the longest life and most 
universal acceptance. In reviewing some of the Aryan 
myths — in a hasty and general review as it must needs 
be — the preceding chapter will serve to guide us to the 
myths most closely connected with religious notions, which 
have a chief claim upon our attention. Indeed, reading in 
a converse manner, it was the fact that so many myths clung 
around certain natural phenomena which allowed us, with 
proper reservation, to point these out as the phenomena 
which held the most intimate place in men's minds and 
hearts. With proper reservations, because the highest, most 
abstracted god does not lend himself as a subject for the 
myth-making faculty. He stands apart from the polytheistic 
circle : below him stand the nature-gods who are also the 
heroes of the mythologies. 

And now, with a backward glance to what has been 
already written, we may expect the chief myth systems to 
divide themselves into certain classes corresponding with 
the god — or natural phenomenon — that is their concern. 
We may expect to find myths relating especially to the 
labours of the sun, like those of Heracles and Thorr, or to 
the wind, like that of Hermes stealing the cattle of Apollo, 
or to the earth sleeping in the embrace of winter, or sorrow- 
ing for the loss of her greenery, or joying again in her re- 
covered life. And again we may look to find myths more 



256 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

intimately concerned with death, and with the looked-for 
future of the soul. These will mingle like mingling streams, 
but we shall often be able to trace their origin. 

But, to begin with, do not suppose that, if I say that a 
natural phenomenon has given rise to a story, I mean to 
say that the story could not have arisen except through this 
natural phenomenon. Or, to put it in plainer language, do 
not suppose that if I say that this or that adventure is 
related of the sun or of the wind, I mean that the adven- 
ture was never heard of before the sun or wind was wor- 
shipped as a god or idealized as a hero. If Indra,. or Apollo, 
is called the serpent-slayer, I do not mean that it is by the 
battle of the sun and the clouds that men got the idea of 
slaying serpents. If the wind is said to ride a-horseback 
over hill and dale, if the thunder-god is said to hurl his 
hammer at the mountain-tops, I do not mean that men 
never thought of horses or battle-hammers till they began 
to make stories about the wind and sun. What I do mean is 
that certain special forms of the myths related, as we now see 
them, were told of the Aryan god who was some pheno- 
menon of nature — the sun or whatever he might be. It is 
necessary to give this word of caution, because the relation- 
ship of mythology to religion has sometimes, by recent 
writings upon the subject, been a good deal confused and 
obscured. 

The diversity of the natural phenomena which give them 
rise will not in any way hinder the myths from reproducing 
the human elements which have, since the world began 
held their pre-eminence in romance and history. There 
will be love-stories, stories of battle and victory, of magic 
and strange disguises, of suddenly acquired treasure, and, 
most attractive of all to the popular mind, stories of princes 
and princesses whose princedom is hidden under a servile 



SUN-MYTHS. 257 



station or beggar's gaberdine, and of heroes who allow their 
heroism to rust for a while in strange inaction, that 

' Imitate the sun, 
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds 
To smother up his beauty from the world, 
That, when he please again to be himself, 
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at.' 

Not necessarily because such heroes were the sun, but 
rather that the tales, appealing so intimately to the common 
sympathies of human nature, attach themselves pre-emi- 
nently to the great natural hero, the sun-god. 

To begin, then, with the sun-god. His love-stories relate 
most commonly the pursuit of the dawn, a woman, by the 
god of day. She flies at the approach of the 
sun ; or, if the two are married in early morning, un " m y s - 
when the day advances, the dawn dies or the sun leaves 
her to pursue his allotted journey. We read how Apollo 
pursued Daphne, while she still fled from him, and at last, 
praying to the gods, was changed into a laurel, which ever 
afterwards remained sacred to the son of Leto. There is 
nothing new in the story ; it might be related of any hero. 
Yet, as we find Greek art so often busy with it, we might 
guess that it had obtained for some reason a hold more 
than commonly firm upon the popular imagination. And 
when we turn from the Greek to the Sanskrit we are able 
to unravel the myth and show it, so far as the names are 
concerned, peculiar to the sun-god. Daphne (it is believed) 
is the Sanskrit Ahana, that is to say, the Dawn. 

A tenderer love-story is that which speaks of the sun and 
the dawn as united at the opening of the day, but of the 
separation which follows when the sun reveals himself in 
his true splendour. The parting, however, will not be 
eternal, for the sun in the evening shall sink into the arms 

s 



258 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

of the west, as in the morning he left those of the east — 
all the physical appearances at sundown will correspond 
with those of the dawn — so in poetical language he will 
be said to return to his love again at the evening of life. 
In right accord with its natural origin and native attractive- 
ness, we find this story repeated almost identically as regards 
its chief incidents by all the branches of the Aryan family. 
For an Indian version of it the reader may consult the story 
of Urvan and Pururavas, told by Mr. Max Miiller from one 
of the Vedas. 1 Urva-si is a fairy who falls in love with 
Pururavas, a mortal, and consents to become his wife, on 
condition that she should never see him without his royal 
garment on, 'for this is the manner of women.' For a while 
they lived together happily; but the Gandhavas, the fairy 
beings to whom Urva^i belonged, were jealous of her love 
for a mortal, and they laid a plot to separate them. ' Now, 
there was a ewe with two lambs tied to the couch of Urvari 
and Pururavas, and the fairies stole one of them, so that 
Urvari upbraided her husband and said, "They steal my 
darlings as though I lived in a land where there is no hero, 
and no man." And Pururavas said, "How can that be 
a land without heroes or men where I am?" and naked he 
sprang up. Then the Gandhavas sent a flash of lightning, 
and Urvaii saw her husband naked as by daylight. Then 
she vanished. " I come back," she said ; and went.' 

Cupid loves Psyche as Pururavas Urva^i, but here the 
story is so far changed that the woman breaks the condition 
laid upon their union, Not this time by accident, but from 
the evil counselling of her two sisters, Psyche disobeys her 
husband. They have long been married, but she has never 

1 Or, strictly speaking, the Brahmana of the Yagur Veda. The Brah- 
mana is the scholiast (as it were) or targum of the original text. Urvaji 
is Ushas, the Dawn. 



SUN-MYTHS. 259 



seen his face ; and doubts begin to arise lest some horrid 
monster, and not a god, may be the sharer of her couch. 
So she takes the lamp, and when she deems her husband 
is fast locked in sleep, gazes upon the face of the god of 
love. 

' But as she turned at last 
To quench the lamp, there happed a little thing 
That quenched her new delight, for flickering, 
The treacherous flame cast on his shoulder fair 
A burning drop ; he woke, and seeing her there, 
The meaning of that sad sight knew full well ; 
Nor was there need the piteous tale to tell.' 1 

Here, it is true, we have wandered away from the adven- 
tures of the sun. Cupid or Eros is in no sense a sun- 
god; nor has Psyche any proved connection with Ushas, 
the Dawn. Once a sun-myth does not meanalways a 
sun-myth. 2 So much the contrary, that it is part of our 
business to show how stories, first appropriated to Olympus 
or Asgard, may descend to take their place among the 
commonest collection of nursery tales. It is the case with 
this myth of the Dawn. The reader's acquaintance with 
nursery literature has probably already anticipated the kin- 
ship to be claimed by one of the most familiar childish 
legends. But as one more link to rivet the bond of union 
between Urvasi and Pururavas and Beauty and the Beast, 

1 Morris, Earthly Paradise : Cupid and Psyche. 

2 I have no doubt there is another element in all these stories, not 
inconsistent with but complementary to the first— namely, what I will 
call a mystery element connected with a descent to the world of shades, 
such as formed the staple of the Eleusinian mysteries. Thus I think 
Pururavas is the hidden sun (the dark Osiris as it were). He might 
call himself Pururavas under the earth as Prince Hatt is Prince Hatt 
under the earth. This would explain how the story got to be connected 
with Psyche (the Soul). It may be said, too, that there is often a mystery 
elemenl connected with such notions as the concealment of names, etc. 



26o THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

let us look at a story of Swedish origin called Prince Hatt 
under the Earth. 

'There was once, very very long ago, a king who had 
three daughters, all exquisitely fair, and much more amiable 
than other maidens, so that their like was not to be found 
far or near. But the youngest princess excelled her sisters, 
not only in beauty, but in goodness of heart and kindness 
of disposition. She was consequently greatly beloved by 
all, and the king himself was more fondly attached to her 
than to either of his other daughters. 

1 It happened one autumn that there was a fair in a town 
not far from the king's residence, and the king himself 
resolved on going to it with his attendants. When on the 
eve of departure, he asked his three daughters what they 
would like for fairings, it being his constant custom to make 
them some present on his return home. The two elder 
princesses began instantly to enumerate precious things of 
curious kinds ; one would have this, the other that ; but the 
youngest daughter asked for nothing. At this the king was 
surprised, and asked her whether she would not like some 
ornament or other; but she answered that she had plenty 
of gold and jewels. When the king, however, would not 
desist from urging her, she at length said, "There is one 
thing which I would gladly have, if only I might venture to 
ask it of my father." "What may that be?" inquired the 
king ; " say what it is, and if it be in my power you shall 
have it." " It is this," replied the princess, " I have heard 
talk of the three singing leaves, and them I wish to have 
before anything else in the world." The king laughed at 
her for making so trifling a request, and at length exclaimed, 
" I cannot say that you are very covetous, and would rather 
by half that you had asked for some greater gift. You shall, 
however, have what you desire, though it should cost me 



SUN-MYTHS. 261 



half my realm." He then bade his daughters farewell and 
rode away.' 

Of course he goes to the fair, and on his way home 
happens to hear the three singing leaves, ' which moved to 
and fro, and as they swayed there came forth a sound such 
as it would be impossible to describe.' The king was glad 
to have found what his daughter had wished for, and was 
about to pluck them, but the instant he stretched forth his 
hand towards them, they withdrew from his grasp, and a 
powerful voice was heard from under the earth saying, 
' Touch not my leaves.' ' At this the king was somewhat 
surprised, and asked who it was, and whether he could not 
purchase the leaves for gold or good words. The voice 
answered, " I am Prince Hatt under the Earth, and you will 
not get my leaves either with good or bad as you desire. 
Nevertheless I will propose to you one condition." "What 
condition is that ? " asked the king with eagerness. " It is," 
answered the voice, "that you promise me the first living 
thing that you meet when you return to your palace." ' As 
we anticipate, the first thing which he meets is his youngest 
daughter, who therefore is left with lamentation under the 
hazel bush: and, as is its wont on such occasions, the 
ground opens, and she finds herself in a beautiful palace. 
Here she lives long and happily with Prince Hatt, upon 
condition that she shall never see him. But at last she is 
permitted to pay a visit to her father and sisters ; and her 
stepmother succeeds in awakening her curiosity and her 
fears, lest she should really be married to some horrid 
monster. The princess thus allows herself to be persuaded 
to strike a light and gaze on her husband while he is asleep. 
Of course, just as her eyes have lighted upon a beautiful 
youth he awakes, and as a consequence of her disobedience 
— (hefe the story alters somewhat) — he is struck blind, and 



262 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

the two are obliged to wander over the earth, and endure 
all manner of misfortunes before Prince Hatt's sight is at 
last restored. 

The sun is so apt to take the place of an almost super- 
human hero, that most of the stories of such when they are 
purely mythical relate some part of the sun's daily course 
and labours. Thus in the Greek, Perseus, Theseus, Jason, 
are in the main sun-heroes, though they mingle with their 
histories tales of real human adventure. One of the most 
easily traceable sun-stories is that of Perseus and the Gorgon. 
The later representations of Medusa in Greek art give her 
a beautiful dead face shrouded by luxurious snaky tresses ; 
but the earlier art presents us with a round face, distorted 
by a hideous grin from ear to ear, broad cheeks, low fore- 
head, over which curl a few flattened locks. We at once 
see the likeness of this face to the full moon ; a likeness 
which, without regard to mythology, forces itself upon us ; 
and then the true story of Perseus flashes upon us as the 
extinction of the moon by the sun's light. This is the 
baneful Gorgon's head, the full moon, which so many 
nations superstitiously believed could exert a fatal power 
over the sleeper ; and when slain by the son of Danae, it 
is the pale ghostlike disc which we see by day. It is very 
interesting to see how the Greeks made a myth of the moon 
in its — one may say — literal unidealized aspect, in addition 
to the countless more poetical myths which spoke of the 
moon as a beautiful goddess, queen of the night, the virgin 
huntress surrounded by her pack of dogs — the stars. In the 
instance of Medusa these two aspects of one natural ap- 
pearance are brought into close relationship, for Athene — 
who is sometimes a moon-goddess — wears the Gorgon's head 
upon her shield. 

As we have passed on to speak of the moon, we may as 



MOON-MYTHS. 263 



well notice some of the other moon-myths : though in the 

case of these, as of the myths of the sun, our only object 

must be to show the characteristic forms which __ . 

Moon-myths, 
this order of tales assumes, so that the way may 

be partly cleared for their detection ; nothing like a complete 
list of the infinitely varied shapes which the same nature- 
story can assume being possible. One of the most beautiful 
of moon-myths is surely the tale of Artemis (Diana) and 
Endymion. This last, the beautiful shepherd of Latmos, 1 by 
his name ■ He who enters,' is in origin the sun just entering 
the cave of night. 2 The moon looking upon the setting sun 
is a signal for his long sleep, which in the myth becomes 
the sleep of death. The same myth reappears in the well- 
known German legend of Tannhauser. He enters a 
mountain, the Venusberg, or Mount of Venus, and is not 
sent to sleep, but laid under an enchantment by the goddess 
within. In other versions of the legend the mountain is 
called not Venusberg but Horelberg, and from this name we 
trace the natural origin of the myth. For there was an old 
moon-goddess of the Teutons called Horel or Hursel. She 
therefore is the enchantress in this case ; and the Christian 
knight falls a victim to the old German moon-goddess. It 
has been supposed that the story of the massacre of St. 
Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins — whose bones they 
show to this day at Cologne — arose out of the same nature- 
myth; and that this St. Ursula is also none other than 
Hursel, followed by her myriad troop of stars.3 

The northern religion, or say the old German creed its 

1 Connected with Lethe, concealment or forgetfulness, as with L6to, 
the mother of Apollo. All signify the darkness. 

2 See last chapter, p. 252. Endymion is found by Artemis sleeping 
in a ca^e of Latmos. 

8 See Baring-Gould, Curious Myths, etc. 



264 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



first cousin, has been fruitful in myths which were repeated 
all through the Middle Ages and out of which the greater 
Northern P art °f our popular tales have sprung. Thor, 
sun-myths, originally the sun and now the god of thun- 
etc - der, the champion of men, and the enemy of 
the Jotuns (giants), becomes in later days Jack the Giant 
Killer ; Odin, by a like descent, the Wandering Jew, or the 
Pied Piper of Hamelin. And thus through a hundred 
popular legends we can detect the natural appearance out 
of which they originally sprang. Let us look at them first 
in their old heathen forms. Thor, the hero and sun-god, 
the northern Heracles, distinguishes himself as the im- 
placable enemy of the rime-giants and frost-giants, the 
powers of cold and darkness ; and to carry on his 
hostilities, he makes constant expeditions, ' farings ' into 
giant-land, or Jotunheim, as it is called; and these 
expeditions generally end in the thorough discomfiture of 
the strong but rude and foolish personifications of barren 
nature. 

One of these, the adventure to the house of Thrym, 1 is to 
recover Thor's hammer, which has been stolen by the 
giant and hidden many miles beneath the earth. A spy 
is sent from Asgard (the city of the gods) into Jotunheim, 
and brings back word that Thrym will not give up his 
prize unless Freyja— goddess of Spring and Beauty — be 
given to him as his bride ; and at first Thor proposes this 
alternative to Freyja herself, little, as may be guessed, to her 
satisfaction. 

1 He is actually a reduplication of Thor ; for his name means thunder^ 
as does Thor's. Thor is of course much more than a god of thunder 
only ; but his hammer is undoubtedly the thunder-bolt. Thrym re- 
presents the same power associated with beings of frost and snow, the 
winter thunder, in fact. This stealing Thor's hammer is merely a 
repetition of the idea implied by his name and character. 



NORTHERN SUN-MYTHS, ETC. 265 

'iWroth was Freyja and with fury fumed, 
All the ^Esir's hall under her trembled ; 
Broken flew the famed Brisinga necklace.' * 

But the wily Loki settles the difficulty. Thor shall to 
Jotunheim clad in Freyja's weeds, 

* Let by his side, keys jingle, and a neat coif set on his head.' 

So taking Loki with him clad as a serving-maid, the god 
fares to Thrym's house, as though he were the looked-for 
bride. It must, one would suppose, have been an anxious 
time for Thor and Loki, while unarmed they sate in the 
hall of the giant ; for the hero could not avoid raising some 
suspicions by his unwomanly appearance and demeanour. 
He alone devoured, we are told, an ox, eight salmon, ' and 
all the sweetmeats women should have,' and he drank 
eight ' scalds' of mead. Thrym naturally exclaimed that 
he never saw brides eat so greedily or drink so much mead. 
But the 'all-crafty' Loki sitting by, explained how this 
was owing to the hurry Freyja was in to behold her bride- 
groom, which left her no time to eat for the eight nights 
during which she had been journeying there. And so again 
when Thrym says — 

' Why are so piercing Freyja's glances ? 
Methinks that fire burns from her eyes,' 

Loki explains that for the same reason she had not slept 
upon her journey ; and the foolish, vain giant is gulled once 
more. At last the coveted prize, the hammer, was brought 
in to consecrate the marriage, and ' Thor's soul laughed in 
his breast, when the fierce-hearted his hammer knew. He 
slew Thrym, the Thursar's (giant's) lord, and the Jotun's 
race crushed he utterly.' 

At another time Thor engages Alvis, ' of the race of the 
1 Which Freyja wore. 



266 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

Thursar,' x in conversation upon all manner of topics, con- 
cerning the names which different natural objects bear 
among men, among gods, among giants, and among dwarfs, 
until he guilefully keeps him above earth till after sunrise, 
which it is not possible for a dwarf or Jotun to do and live. 
So Alvis bursts asunder. 2 This tale shows clearly enough 
how much Thor's enemies are allied with darkness. 

Thor is not always so successful. In another of his 
journeys 3 the giants play a series of tricks upon him, quite 
suitable to the Teutonic conception of the cold north, as a 
place of magic, glamour, and illusion. One giant induces 
the thunderer to mistake a mountain for him, and to hurl at 
it the death-dealing bolt — his hammer Mjolnir. Afterwards 
he is set to drain a horn which he supposes he can finish at 
a draught, but finds that after the third pull at it, scarcely 
more than the rim has been left bare ; at the same time 
Loki engages in an eating match with one Logi, and is 
utterly worsted. But in reality Thor's horn has reached to 
the sea, and he has been draining at that; while the 
antagonist of Loki is the devouring fire itself. Next Thor 
is unable to lift a cat from the ground, for it is in truth 
the great Midgard serpent which girds the whole earth. 
Finally he is overcome in a wrestling match with an old hag, 
whose name is Ella, that is Old Age or Death. Enough 
has been said in these stories to show how directly the 
cloak of Thor descends to the heroes of our nursery tales, 
Jack the Giant Killer and Jack of the Bean-Stalk. 

Not unconnected with the sun-god are the mythical 

1 Giant does not really translate Thurs. Most of the Thursar were 
giants as opposed to the Dvargar, the dwarfs. But this Alvis (all-wise) 
is spoken of as a dwarf. 

2 There is a clear recollection of this in the end of Rumpelstiltskin. 

3 This story, be it said, comes only from the younger Edda. No 
hint of it in the older. 



NORTHERN SUN-MYTHS, ETC. 267 

heroes of northern poetry, the Perseus or Theseus of 
Germany and Scandinavia. The famous Sigurd the Vol- 
sung, the slayer of Fafnir, or his counterpart Siegfrid of the 
Nibelung song, or again the hero of our own English poem 
Beowulf, 1 are especially at war with dragons — which repre- 
sent the powers of darkness — or with beings of a Jotun-like 
character. They are all discoverers of treasure; and this 
so far corresponds with the character of Thor that the 
thunderbolt is often spoken of as the revealer of the 
treasures of the earth, and that the sign of it was employed 
as a charm for that purpose. And when we read the 
account of these adventures we see how entirely unhuman 
in character most of them were, and how much the inci- 
dents in the drama bear a reminiscence of the natural 
phenomena from which they sprang. 

This is especially the case with Beowulf. The poem is 
weird and imaginative in the highest degree : the atmosphere 
into which we are thrown seems to be the misty delusive air 
of Jotunheim, and the unearthly beings whom Beowulf 
encounters must have had birth within the shadows of night 
and in the mystery which attached to the wild unvisited 
tracts of country. Grendel, a horrid ghoul who feasts on 
human beings, whom Beowulf wrestles with (as Thor 
wrestles with Ella) and puts to death, is described as an 
* inhabiter of the moors,' the ' fen and fastnesses ; ' he comes 
upon the scene ' like a cloud from the misty hills, through 
the wan night a shadow-walker stalking ' ; and of him and 
his mother it is said, 

1 'Beowulf,' we have said, is thought to have been first composed in 
English at the end of the seventh century. There was probably an 
earlier and more simple version of the poem which has come down to 
us. I do not mean to say that either Beowulf or Sigurd are simply 
personifications of the sun ; only that some of their belongings and 
adventures have descended to them from sun-heroes. 



268 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

' They a father know not, 
Whether any of them was 
Born before 
Of the dark ghosts.' 

They inhabit, in a secret land, the wolves' retreat, and in 
* windy ways — 

Where the mountain stream 
Under the ness's mist 
Downward flows.' 

Of the myths which spring from the wind, and which may 

therefore be reckoned the children of Odin, by far the most 

interesting are those which attach to him in his 

-my s. p ar j. q £ pgycQpQj^p^ or soul-leader, and which 

form a part, therefore, of an immense series of tales con- 
nected with the Teutonic ideas of death as they were 
detailed in the last chapter. There were many reasons why 
these occupied a leading place in middle-age legend. The 
German race is naturally a gloomy or at least a thoughtful 
one : and upon this natural gloom and thoughtfulness the 
influence of their new faith acted with redoubled force, 
awaking men to thoughts not only of a new life but of a 
new death. Popular religion took as strong a hold of the 
darker as of the brighter aspects of Catholicism, and was 
busy grafting the older notions of the soul's future state 
upon the fresh stock of revealed religion. Thus many of 
the popular notions both of heaven and hell may be dis- 
covered in the beliefs of heathen Germany. Let us, there- 
fore, abandoning the series of myths which belong properly 
to the Aryan religious beliefs as given in Chapter IX. (though 
upon these, so numerous are they, we seem scarcely to have 
begun), turn to others which illustrate our last chapter. 
Upon one we have already touched ; Odin, as chooser of 
the dead, hurrying through the air towards a battle-field with 



WIND-MYTHS. 269 



his troop of shield-maidens, the Valkyriur ; * or if we like to 
present the simpler nature-myth, the wind bearing away the 
departing breath of dying men, and the clouds which he 
carries on with him in his course. For there is no doubt 
that these Valkyriur, these shield- or swan-maidens, who 
have the power of transforming themselves at pleasure into 
birds, were originally none other than the clouds ; perhaps 
like the cattle of Indra, they were at first the clouds of sun- 
rise. We meet with such beings elsewhere than in northern 
mythology. The Urva^i, whose story we have been relating 
just now, after the separation from her mortal husband changes 
herself into a bird and is found by Pururavas in this disguise, 
sitting with her friends the Gandhavas upon the water of a 
lake. This means the clouds of evening resting upon the wide 
blue sky. The Valkyriur themselves, when they have been 
married to men, often leave them, as the Indian fairy left 
her husband ; and lest they should do so it is not safe to 
restore them the swan's plumage which they wore as Valky- 
riur ; should they again obtain their old equipment they will 
be almost sure to don it and desert their home to return to 
their old life. The Valkyriur, then, are clouds ; and in so 
far as they appear in the legends of other nations they have 
no intimate connection with Odin. But when they are the 
clouds of sunset, and when Odin in his character of soul- 
bearer becomes before all things the wind of the setting sun 
(that breeze which so often rises just as the sun goes down, 
and which itself might stand for the escaping soul of the 
dying day), then the Valkyriur make part of an ancient myth 
of death. And almost all the stories of swan-maidens, or 
transformations into swans, which are so familiar to the ears 
of childhood, are related to Odin's warrior maidens. If we 
notice the plot of these stories, we shall see that in them 
1 Valkyria, sing, j Valkyriur, pi. 



270 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

too the transformation usually takes place at sun-setting or 
sunrising. For instance, in the tale of the six swans in 
Grimm's Household Stories? the enchanted brothers of the 
princess can only reappear in their true shapes just one 
hour before sunset. 

In Christian legends the gods of Asgard, subjected to the 
changes which inevitably follow a change of belief, became 
demoniacal powers ; and Odin the chief god takes the place 
of the arch-fiend. For this part he is especially suited by 
his character of conductor of the souls ; if he formerly led 
them to heaven, he now thrusts them down to hell. But so 
many elements came together to compose the mediaeval 
idea of the devil that in this character the individuality of 
Odin is scarcely preserved. At times a wish to revive 
something of this personal character was felt, especially 
when the frequent sound of the wind awoke old memories ; 
then Odin re-emerges as some particular fiend or damned 
human soul. He is the Wandering Jew, a being whose 
eternal restlessness well keeps up the character of the wind 
blowing where it listeth : or he is, as we have said, the Wild 
Huntsman of the Harz, and of many other places. 

The name of this last being, Hackelberg, or Hackel- 
barend (cloak-bearer), sufficiently points him out as Odin, 
who in the heathen traditions had been wont to wander 
over the earth clad in a blue cloak, 2 and broad hat, and 
carrying a staff. Hackelberg, the huntsman to the Duke of 
Brunswick, had refused even on his death-bed the ministra- 
tions of a priest, and swore that the cry of his dogs was 

1 Kinder-u. Hausm'drchen. 

2 I.e. the sky. See Grimm, Deutsche Myth. , s.v. (Hackelberg) ; and 
also two very interesting articles by A. Kuhn, Zeitsch. fur deutsch. 
Alterth.y v. 379, vi. 1 1 7, showing relationship of Hackelbarend and the 
Sarameyas. 



WIND-MYTHS. 271 



pleasanter to him than holy rites, and that he would rather 
hunt for ever upon earth than go to heaven. ' Then,' said 
the man of God, 'thou shalt hunt on until the Day of 
Judgment.' Another legend relates that Hackelberg was a 
wicked noble who was wont to hunt on Sundays as on other 
days, and (here comes in the popular version) to impress the 
poor peasants to aid him. One day he was joined suddenly 
by two horsemen. One was mild of aspect, but the other 
was grim and fierce, and from his horse's mouth and nostril 
breathed fire. Hackelberg turned then from his good 
angel, and went on with his wild chase, and now, in com- 
pany of the fiend, he hunts and will hunt till the last day. 
He is called in Germany the hel-jager, 'hell-hunter.' The 
peasants hear his ' hoto ' ' hutu,' as the storm-wind rushes 
past their doors, and if they are alone upon the hillside 
they hide their faces while the hunt goes by. The white 
owl, Totosel, is a nun who broke her vows, and now mingles 
her 'tutu' (towhoo) with his 'holoa.' He hunts, accom- 
panied by two dogs (the two dogs of Yama), in heaven, all 
the year round, save upon the twelve nights between Christ- 
mas and Twelfth-night. 1 If any door is left open upon the 
night when Hackelberg goes by, one of the dogs will run in 
and lie down in the ashes of the hearth, nor will any power 
be able to make him stir. During all the ensuing year 
there will be trouble in that household, but when the 
year has gone round and the hunt comes again, the un- 
bidden guest will rise from his couch, and, wildly howling, 
rush forth to join his master. Strangely distorted, there 

1 These twelve nights occupy in the middle-age legends the place of 
a sort of battle-ground between the powers of light and darkness. One 
obvious reason of this is that they lie in midwinter, when the infernal 
powers are the strongest. Another reason, perhaps, is that they lie 
between the great Christian feast and the great heathen one, the feast 
pf Yule. Each party might be expected to put forth its full power, 



272 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

lurks in this part of the story a ray of the Vedic sleep-god 
Sarameyas. 

' Destroyer of sickness, guard of the house, oh, thou who 
takest all shapes, be to us a peace-bringing friend.' 

The Valkyriur in their turn are changed by the mediaeval 
spirit into witches. The Witches' Sabbath, the old beldames 
on broomsticks riding through the air, to hold their revels on 
the Brocken, reproduce the swan-maidens hurrying to join 
the flight of Odin. And, again, changed once more, * Old 
Mother Goose ' is but a more modern form of a middle-age 
witch, when the thought of witches no longer strikes terror. 
And while we are upon the subject of witches it may be well 
to recall how the belief in witches has left its trace in our 
word ' nightmare.' Mara was throughout Europe believed 
to be the name of a very celebrated witch somewhere in the 
North, though the exact place of her dwelling was variously 
stated. It is highly probable that this name Mara was once 
a byname of the death-goddess Hel, and it may be etymo- 
logically connected with the name of the sea (Meer), the 
sea being, as we have seen, according to one set of beliefs, 
the home of the soul. 

Odin, or a being closely analogous with him, reappears in 
the familiar tale of the Pied Piper of Hameln, he who, when 
the whole town of Hameln suffered from a plague of rats 
and knew not how to get rid of them, appeared suddenly — 
no one knew from whence — and professed himself able to 
charm the pest away by means of the secret magic of his 
pipe. But it is a profanation to tell the enchanted legend 
otherwise than in the enchanted language of Browning : — 

' Into the street the piper stept, 
Smiling first a little smile, 
As if he knew what magic slept 
In his quiet pipe the while ; 
Then like a musical adept 
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled.' 



MYTHS OF DEA TH AND THE O THER WORLD. 273 

Then the townsfolk, freed from their burden, refused the 
piper his promised reward, and scornfully chased him from 
the town. On the 26th of June he was seen again, but this 
time (Mr. Browning has not incorporated this little fact) 
fierce of aspect and dressed like a huntsman, yet still blowing 
upon the magic pipe. 

Now it is not the rats who follow, but the children : — 

' All the little boys and girls, 
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls, 
And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls, 
Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after 
The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.' 

And so he leads them away to Koppelberg Hill, and 

*Lo, as they reached the mountain side, 
A wondrous portal opened wide, 
As if a cavern were suddenly hollowed ; 
And the Piper advanced and the children followed. 
And when all were in, to the very last, 
The door in the mountain side shut fast.' 

This too is a myth of death. It is astonishing when we 
come to examine into the origin of popular tales how many 
we find that had at first a funeral character. Myths of 
This Piper hath indeed a magic music which death and 
none can disobey, for it is the whisper of death; the other 
he himself is the soul-leading Hermes (the wind, wor ' 
the piper), or at least Odin, in the same office. But the 
legend is, in part at any rate, Slavonic ; for it is a Slavonic 
notion which likens the soul to a mouse. 1 When we have 
got this clue, which the modern folk-lore easily gives us, the 
Odinic character of the Piper becomes very apparent. Nay, 

1 Perhaps for a reason like that which made the beetle a symbol of 
the soul or immortality among the Egyptians, namely, because the 
mouse hibernates like the sleeping earth. It is worth noticing that 
Anubis, the Egyptian psychopomp, is also a wind-god. — A. K. 

T 



274 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

in this particular myth we can almost trace a history of the 
meeting of two peoples, Slavonic and German, and the 
junction of their legends. Let us suppose there had been 
some great and long-remembered epidemic which had 
proved peculiarly fatal to the children x of Hameln and the 
country round about. The Slavonic dwellers there — and 
in prehistoric times some Slavs were to be found as far west 
as the Weser — would speak of these deaths mythically as the 
departure of the mice (i.e. the souls), and perhaps, keeping 
the tradition, which we know to be universally Aryan, of a 
water-crossing, might tell of the mice as having gone to the 
water. Or further, they might feign that these souls were led 
there by a piping wind-god : he, too, is the common property 
of the Aryan folk. Then the Germans coming in, and wish- 
ing to express the legend in their mythological form, would 
tell how the same Piper had piped away all the children from 
the town. So a double story would spring up about the 
same event. The Weser represents one image of death, 
and might have served for the children as well as for the 
mice : to make the legend fuller, however, another image is 
selected for them, the dark, ' concealed ' place, namely, 
Hel, or the cave of Night and Death. 

The two images of death which occur in the last story 
rival each other through the field of middle-age legend and 
romance. When we hear of a man being borne along in a 
boat, or lying deep in slumber beneath a mountain, we may 
let our minds wander back to Balder sailing across the 
ocean in his burning ship Hringhonii, and to the same Balder 

1 The appearance of children in the story need not, however, 
necessarily mean that the mortality had specially affected the children. 
It may only have been an expression like the Latin manes — the little 
ones — used for the souls of the departed. We know how constantly 
in mediaeval art the soul is represented as drawn out of the body in the 
form of a child. 



MYTHS OF DEATH AND THE OTHER WORLD. 275 

in the halls of Hel's palace. The third image of death is 
the blazing pyre unaccompanied by any sea- voyage. One 
or other of these three allegories meets us at every turn. If 
the hero has been snatched away by fairy power to save him 
from dying, and the last thing seen of him was in a boat — 
as Arthur disappears upon the lake Avalon — the myth holds 
out the hope of his return, and sooner or later the story of 
this return will break off and become a separate legend. 
Hence the numerous half-unearthly heroes, such as Lohen- 
grin, who come men know not whence, and are first seen 
sleeping in a boat upon a river. These are but broken 
halves of complete myths, which should have told of the 
former disappearance of the knight by the same route. 
Both portions really belong to the tale of Lohengrin ; he 
went away first in a ship in search of the holy grail, and in 
the truest version 1 returns in like manner in a boat drawn 
by a swan. In some tales he is called the Knight of the 
Swan. He comes suddenly, in answer to a prayer to 
Heaven for help, uttered by the distressed Else of Brabant. 
But he does not return at once again to the Paradise which 
has sent him to earth. He remains upon earth, and be- 
comes the husband of Else, and a famous warrior ; and part 
of another myth entwines itself with his story. Else must 
not ask his name ; but she disobeys his imperative com- 
mand, and this fault parts them for ever. Here we have 
Cupid and Psyche, or Prince Hatt and his wife, over again. 
The boat appears once more drawn by the same swan; 
Lohengrin steps into it, and disappears from the haunts 
of men. We have already seen how, through the Valky- 
riur, the swan is connected with ideas of death. It re- 
mains to notice how they are naturally so connected by 

1 There are at least six different versions of the same legend given in 
Grimm's Deutsche Sagen. 



276 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

the beautiful legend that the swan sings once only in his 
life, namely, when he is leaving it — that his first song is his 
own funeral melody. A much older form of the Lohengrin 
myth is referred to in the opening lines of Beowulf, where 
an ancestor of that hero is said to have been found, a 
little child, lying asleep in an open boat which had drifted, 
no one knows whence, to the shore of Gothland. 

Death being thus so universally symbolized by the River 
of Death, it is easy to see the origin of the myth that ghosts 
will not cross living water. It meant nothing else than that 
a ghost cannot return again to life. Even witches cannot 
do so, as we know in the case of Tarn O'Shanter, that when 
he reached the Brig' o' Doon the pursuit was baffled. 

Many are the impressive stories connected with the myth 
of the soul's transit over water — be it a River or a Sea of 
Death. In the dark days which followed the overthrow of 
the Western Empire, when all the civilization of its remoter 
territories had melted away, there grew up among the 
fishermen of Northern Gaul a wild belief that the Channel 
opposite them was the mortal river, and that the shores of 
this island were the asylum of dark ghosts. The myth went, 
that in the villages of the Gaulish coast the fishermen were 
summoned by rotation to perform the dreadful task of 
ferrying over the departed spirits. At night a knocking was 
heard on their doors, a signal of their duties, and when they 
approached the beach they saw boats lying deep in the 
water as though heavily freighted, but yet to their eyes 
empty. Each stepping in, took his rudder, and then by an 
unfelt wind the boat was wafted in one night across a 
distance which, rowing and sailing, they could ordinarily 
compass scarcely in eight. Arrived at the opposite shore 
(our coast), they heard names called over, and voices 
answering as if by rota, and they felt their boats becoming 



MYTHS OF DEATH AND THE OTHER WORLD. 277 

light. Then when all the ghosts had landed they were 
wafted back to Gaul. 1 

The belief in the passage by the soul over a ' Bridge % 
which is the bridge over the River of Death is as universal 
almost as the notion of that River of Death itself. Many 
creeds see that bridge in the Milky Way. The Vedic 
hymns do so. They call the Milky Way by many names, of 
which the most common is the path of Yama, the way to 
the house of Yama, and Yama is the ruler of the Dead — ' a 
narrow path,' as we have already quoted. 

1 A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches thither, 2 a path 
untrodden by men, a path I know of.' 

The Persians, too, knew the bridge under the name of 
Kinvad or Chinvad. And from the Persians the Mohamme- 
dans get the same notion, which is embodied in the Koran. 
There the Bridge of Death is called Es-Sirat. It is finer 
than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword, along 
which, nevertheless, the soul of the good Moslem will be 
snatched across like lightning or like the wind; but the 
wicked man or the unbeliever will fall headlong thence into 
an abyss of fire beneath. 

The Norsemen had their Bridge of Souls in the Gjallarbru, 
' The Resounding Bridge,' over which Balder had to ride. 3 
And when we read the mediaeval accounts of journeys to the 
other world, to Purgatory or Hell, in almost every one we 
find that the passage over a Bridge — the Brig' o' Dread of 
the ballad — is a part of the journey. 

Among the sleepers underground whose legend repro- 

1 This myth is related by Procopius (B. G., iv.). There is little 
doubt that this island, which he calls Brittia (and of course distinguishes 
from Britannia), is really identical with it. The wall which he speaks 
of as dividing it is proof sufficient. 

2 To the house of Yama. 3 See above, p. 251. 



278 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

duces the image of death as simply a life within the tomb, 
the most celebrated are Kaiser Karl in the Unterberg — the 
under-hill, or hill leading to the under-world ; or, as another 
legend goes, in the Niirnberg, which is really the Nieder- 
berg (im niedem Berg), the down-leading hill ; and Frederick 
Red-Beard sleeping in like manner at Kaiserslautern, or 
under the Rabenspurg (raven's hill). Deep below the earth 
the old Kaiser sits, his knights around him, their armour 
on, the horses harnessed in the stable ready to come forth 
at Germany's hour of need. His long red beard has grown 
through the table on which his head is resting. Once, it is 
said, a shepherd chanced upon the cave which leads down 
to the under-ground palace, and awoke the Emperor from 
his slumber. ' Are the ravens still flying round the hill ? ' 
asked Frederick. 'Yes.' 'Then must I sleep another 
hundred years.' 

We cannot speak of all the images of Death which 
reappear in the popular tales. Very many of these are 
taken from the funeral fire. We constantly meet with 
stories of maidens who lie (asleep probably) surrounded by 
a circle of flame, a hedge of fire. Through this the knight 
or hero must ride to awaken his beloved. When Skirnir 
went down to woo the maiden Gerda — the winter earth 1 — 
he found her house all surrounded by such a hedge of fire. 
But oddly enough, there is another way of representing 
the funeral fire symbolically as a circle of thorns, because 
thorns were constantly used to form the funeral pyre of the 
Northmen. Thence a thorn hedge takes the place of a 
hedge of flame, and it, or even a single thorn, may become 
the symbol of the funeral fire, and so of death. 

Here are two stories in which we see how one image 
may pass into the other. 

1 See above, p. 231. 



MYTHS OF DEA TH AND THE O THER WORLD. 279 

In the tale of Sigurd the Volsung both these symbols are 
used ; when Sigurd first finds Brynhild she has been pricked 
by Odin with a sleep-t/iom, in revenge, because she took 
part against his favourite Hialmgunnar; for she was a 
Valkyria. Sigurd awakes her. At another time he rides to 
her through a circle of fire which she has set round her 
house, and which no other man dared face. In the myth 
of Sigurd, twice as it were riding through death to Brynhild, 
we see first of all a nature-myth precisely of the same kind 
as the myth of Freyr and Gerda (p. 230), 1 precisely the 
reverse of the myth of Persephone. Brynhild is the dead 
earth restored by the kiss of the sun, or of summer. After- 
wards the part of Brynhild is taken by the Sleeping Beauty, 
and Sigurd becomes the prince who breaks through the 
thorn-hedge. Observe one thing in the last story. The 
prick from the sleep-thorn becomes a prick from a spinning- 
wheel, and thus loses all its original meaning, while the circle 
of fire is transformed into a thorn-hedge — proof sufficient 
that they were convertible ideas. 

Lastly, it remains to say that the stories of glass moun- 
tains ascended by knights are probably allegories of death 
— heaven being spoken of to this day by Russian and 
German peasants as a glass mountain. 

1 The fortune which accompanies a myth is very curious. That of 
Freyr and Gerda is by no means conspicuous in the Edda, and I should 
not have been justified in comparing it in importance with the Per- 
sephone myth, but that precisely the same story forms a leading feature 
in the great Norse and Teuton epic, the Volsung and Nibelung songs. 



CHAPTER XII. 



PICTURE-WRITING. 



Though it is true, as we have said before, that every 
manufactured article involves a long chapter of unwritten 
Lateness of history to account for its present form, and the 
the discovery perfection of the material from which it is 
of letters. wr ought, there is no one of them, not the most 
artistic, that will so well repay an effort to hunt it through 
its metamorphoses in the ages to its first starting-point, as 
will the letters that rapidly drop from cur pen when we 
proceed to write its name. Each one of these is a manu- 
factured article at which a long, long series of unknown 
artists have wrought, expanding, contracting, shaping, 
pruning, till at length, the result of centuries of effort, our 
alphabet stands clear — a little army of mute, unpretending 
signs, that are at once the least considered ol our inherited 
riches — mere jots and tittles — and the spells by which all 
our great feats of genius are called into being. Does 
unwritten history or tradition tell us anything of the people 
to whose invention we owe them ? or, on the other hand, 
can we persuade the little shapes with which we are familiar 
to so animate themselves, and give such an account of the 
stages by which they g?ew into their present likeness, as will 
help us to understand better than we did before the mental 



WRITING THE ART OF PICTURING SOUND. 281 

and social conditions of the times of their birth? One 
question, at least, they answer clearly — we know that while 
in their earliest forms they must have preceded the birth 
of History, they were the forerunners and heralds of his 
appearance, and if we are obliged to relegate their invention 
to the dark period of unrecorded events, we must place it 
at least in the last of the twilight hours, the one that 
preceded daybreak, for they come leading sunlight and 
certainty behind them. It will be hard if these revealers 
of other births should prove to be entirely silent about tneir 
own. Another point seems to grow clear as we think. As 
letters are the elements by which records come to us, it is 
not in records, or at least not in early records, that we must 
look for a history of their invention. Like all other tools, 
they will have lent themselves silently to the ends for which 
they were called into being. For a long, long time, they 
will have been too busy giving the history of their employers 
to tell us consciously anything about themselves. We must 
leave the substance of records, then, and look to their manner 
and form, if we would unravel the long story of the invep- 
tion and growth of our alphabet ; and as it is easiest to begin 
with the thing that is nearest to us, let us pause before one 
of our written words, and ask ourselves exactly what it is 
to us. 

In discussing the growth of language, we surmised that 
words were at first descriptive of the things they named, in 
fact, pictures to the ear. What, then, is a writing the 
written word? Is it, too, a picture, and what artofpictur- 
does it picture, to the eye ? When we have m § sound - 
written the words cat, man, lion, what have we done ? We 
have brought the images of certain things into our minds, 
and that by a form presented to the eye ; but is it the form 
of the object we immediately think of? No, it is the form 



282 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

of its name ; it is, therefore, the picture of a sound. To 
picture sound is, surely, a very far-fetched notion, one that 
may have grown out of many previous efforts to convey 
thought from mind to mind ; but certainly not likely to 
occur first to those who began the attempt to give per- 
manent shape to the thoughts floating within them. So 
great and difficult a task must have baffled the powers or 
many enterprisers, and been approached in many ways 
before the first steps towards accomplishing it were securely 
taken. We shall find that the history of our alphabet is a 
record of slow stages of growth, through which the idea of 
sound-writing has been evolved ; the first attempts to record 
events were made in a different direction. Since, as we 
have agreed, we are not likely to find a record of how 
events were first recorded, and as the earliest attempts are 
likely to have been imperfect and little durable, we must be 
content to form our notions of the earliest stage in our 
grand invention, by observing the methods used by savages 
now to aid their memories ; and if we wish to determine 
the period in the history of the human race when such 
efforts are likely to have been first made, we must recall 
what we have already learned of the history of primitive 
man, and settle at what stage of his development the need 
for artificial aids to memory would first press upon him. 

Stories and poetry are not likely to have been the first 
things written down. While communities were small and 
young, there was no need to write painfully what it was so 
delightful to repeat from mouth to mouth, and so easy for 
memories to retain ; and when the stock of tradition and 
the treasure of song grew so large in any tribe as to exceed 
the capacity of ordinary memories (stronger, in some re- 
spects, before the invention of writing than now), men with 
unusual gifts would be chosen and set apart for the purpose 



TALLIES. 283 



of remembering and reciting, and of handing down to 
disciples in the next generation, the precious literature of the 
tribe. Such an order of ' remembrancers ' would soon come 
to be looked upon as sacred, or at least highly honourable, 
and would have privileges and immunities bestowed on 
them which would make them jealous of an invention that 
would lessen the worth of their special gift. The invention 
of writing, then, is hardly likely to have come from the 
story-tellers or bards. It was probably to aid the memory 
in recalling something less attractive and more secret than 
a story or a song that the first record was made. 

So early as the time of the cave-dwellers, there was a 
beginning of commerce. Traces have been found of work- 
shops belonging to that period, where flint weapons and 
tools were made in such quantities as evidently to have 
been designed for purposes of barter, and the presence of 
amber and shells in places far from the coast, speaks of 
trading journeys. With bargains and exchange of com- 
modities, aids to memory must surely have come in ; and 
when we think of the men of the Neolithic age as traders, 
we can hardly be wrong in also believing them to have taken 
the next step in civilization which trade seems to bring with 
it — the invention of some system of mnemonics. 

No man or woman would be likely to trust their bargain- 
ing to another without giving him some little token or 
pledge by way of safeguard against mistake or 
forgetfulness. It would be a very trifling, 
transitory thing at first ; something in the nature of a tally, 
or a succession of knots or woven threads in a garment, 
allied to the knot which we tie on our handkerchief over- 
night to make us remember something in the morning. It 
seems hardly worthy of notice, and yet the invention of 
that artificial aid to memory is the germ of writing, the 



2S4 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

little seed from which such great things have come. Un- 
fortunately, our discoveries of stone-age relics have not yet 
furnished us with any suggestion as to how the men of that 
epoch arranged and carried out the aids to memory they 
probably had ; but we can trace the process of invention 
among still extant races. 

Some tribes of Red Indians, for example, keep records on 
cords called wampum, by means of beads and knots. When 
an embassy is sent from one chieftain to another, the 
principal speaker carries one of these pieces of wampum, 
and from it reads off the articles of the proposed treaty, 
almost as easily as if it were from a note-book. 

In the Eastern Archipelago, and in Polynesia proper, 
cord-records of the same kind were in use forty years ago, 
and by means of them the tax-gatherers in the island of 
Hawaii kept clear accounts of all articles collected from 
the inhabitants of the island. The revenue-book of Hawaii 
was a rope four hundred fathoms long, divided into portions 
corresponding to districts in the island, and each portion 
was under the care of a tax-gatherer, who by means of 
knots, loops, and tufts of different shapes, colours, and 
sizes, managed to keep an accurate account of the number 
of hogs, dogs, pieces of sandal- wood, etc., at which each 
inhabitant of his district was rated. The Chinese, again, 
have a legend that in very early times their people used 
little cords marked by knots of different sizes, instead of 
writing. 

But the people who brought the cord system of mnemonics 
to the greatest perfection were the Peruvians. They were 
still following it at the time of their conquest by the 
Spaniards; but they had elaborated it with such care as 
to make it available for the preservation of even minute 
details of the statistics of the country. The ropes on which 



TALLIES. 285 



they kept their records were called quipus, from quipu, a 
knot. They were often of great length and thickness, and 
from the main ropes depended smaller ones, distinguished 
by colours appropriate to subjects of which their knots 
treated — as, white for silver, yellow for gold, red for soldiers, 
green for corn, parti-coloured when a subject that required 
division was treated of. These dependent coloured strings 
had, again, other little strings hanging from them, and on 
these exceptions were noted. For instance, on the quipus 
devoted to population — the coloured strings on which the 
number of men in each town and village was recorded had 
depending from them little strings for the widowers, and 
no doubt the widows and the old maids had their little 
strings from the coloured cord that denoted women. One 
knot meant ten ; a double knot, one hundred ; two singles, 
side by side, twenty ; two doubles, two hundred ; and the 
position of the knots on their string and their form were 
also of immense importance, each subject having its proper 
place on the quipus and its proper form of knot. The art 
of learning to read quipus must have been difficult to ac- 
quire; it was practised by special functionaries, called 
quipucamayocuna, or knot-officers, who, however, seem 
only to have been able to expound their own records ; 
for when a quipus was sent from a distant province to the 
capital, its own officer had to travel with it to explain it ; 
a clumsy and cumbrous way of sending a letter, it must be 
confessed. 

Knot-records were almost everywhere superseded by 
other methods of recording events as civilization advanced ; 
but still they continued to be resorted to under special 
circumstances, and by people who had not the pens 
of ready writers. Darius made a quipus when he took a 
thong, and tying sixty knots on it, gave it to the Ionian 



286 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

chiefs, that they might untie a knot every day, and go back 
to their own land if he had not returned when all the knots 
were undone. The Scythians, however, who, about the 
same time, sent a message to Darius, afford us an example 
of another way of attaching special meanings to certain 
objects, and thereby giving a peculiar use as aids to memory, 
— writing letters with objects instead of pen and ink, in 
fact. Here, however, symbolism comes ir, and makes the 
mnemonics at once prettier and less trustworthy as capable' 
of more than one interpretation. The Scythian ambas- 
sadors presented Darius (as Herodotus tells us) with a 
mouse, a bird, a frog, and an arrow, and the message with 
which they had been intrusted was that, unless he could 
hide in the earth like a mouse, or fly in the air like a bird, 
or swim in water like a frog, he would never escape the 
arrows of the Scythians. 

Of this last kind of mnemonic was the bow, too heavy 
for an ordinary man to bend, which the long-lived Ethi- 
opians sent to Cambyses ; and the twelve memorial stones 
which Joshua was directed to place in the river Jordan, 
in order that the sons might ask the fathers, and the fathers 
tell the sons what had happened in that place ; and, again, 
such were the yokes and bonds which Jeremiah put round 
his neck when he testified against the alliance with Egypt 
before Zedekiah, and the earthen pot that he broke in the 
presence of the elders of the people. Signs joined with 
words and actions to convey a fuller or more exact meaning 
than words alone could convey. Perhaps we ought hardly 
to call these last examples helps to memory ; they partake 
more of the nature of pictures, and were used to heighten 
the effect of words. But we may regard them as a connect- 
ing link between the merely mechanical tally, wampum and 
quipus, and the effort to record ideas we must now con- 



PICTURING. 287 



sider — picturing. It must, however, always be borne in 
mind that, though we shall speak of these various methods 
of making records as stages of progress and development, 
it is not to be supposed that the later ones immediately, or 
indeed ever wholly, superseded the first any more than the 
introduction of bronze and iron did away with the use of 
flint weapons. The one method subsisted side by side with 
the other, and survived to quite late times, as we see in such 
usages as the bearing forth of the fiery cross to summon 
clansmen to the banner of their chieftain, and the casting 
down of the knight's glove as a gage of battle, or, to come 
down to homely modern instances, the tallies and knots on 
handkerchiefs that unready writers carry to help their 
memories even now. 

Helps to memory of the kinds which we have been 
speaking of never get beyond being helps. They cannot 
carry thought from one to another without the intervention 
of an interpreter, in whose memory they keep fast the words 
that have to be said; they strengthen tradition, but they 
cannot change tradition into history, and are always liable 
to become useless by the death of the man, or order of 
men, to whom they have been intrusted. 

A more independent and lasting method of recording 
events was sure to be aimed at sooner or later ; and we 
may conjecture that it usually took its rise 
among a people at the period when their 1C Uimg ' 
national pride was so developed as to make them anxious 
that the deeds of some conspicuous hero should be made 
known, not only to those interested in telling and hearing 
of them, but to strangers visiting their country, and to remote 
descendants. Their first effort to record an event, so as to 
make it widely known, would naturally be to draw a picture 
of* it, such that all seeing the picture would understand it ; 



288 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

and accordingly we find that the earliest step beyond artificial 
helps to memory is the making of rude pictures which aim at 
showing a deed or event as it occurred without suggesting 
the words of a narrative ; this is called ' picturing ' as distin- 
guished from picture-writing. That this, too, was a very 
early art we may guess from the fact that rude pictures of 
animals have been found among the relics of the earliest 
stone age. Whether or no we are justified in conjecturing 
that the pictures actually found are rough memorials of leal 
hunting scenes, at least we learn from them that the thought 
of depicting objects had come, and the skill to produce a 
likeness been attained ; and the idea of using this power 
to transmit events lies so near to its possession, that we can 
hardly believe one to have been long present without the 
other. To enable ourselves to imagine the sort of picture- 
records with which the stone-age men may have ornamented 
some of their knives, spears, and hammers, we must examine 
the doings of people who have continued in a primitive stage 
of civilization down to historic times. 

Some curious pictures done by North American Indians 
have been found on rocks and stones, and on the stems of 
pine-trees in America, which furnish excellent examples of 
early picturing. Mr. Tylor, in his Early History of Man- 
kind, gives engravings of several of these shadowy records 
of long-past events. One of these, which was found on the 
smoothed surface of a pine-tree, consists merely of a rude 
outline of two canoes, one surmounted by a bear with a 
peculiar tail and the other by a fish, and beyond these a 
quantity of shapes meant for a particular kind of fish. The 
entire picture records the successes of two chieftains named 
Copper- tail Bear and Cat-fish, in a fishing excursion. 
Another picture found on the surface of a rock near Lake 
Superior is more elaborate, and interests us by showing a 






PICTURE- WRITING. 289 

new element in picturing, through which it was destined to 
grow into the condition of picture-writing. This more 
elaborate picture shows an arch with three suns in it — a tor- 
toise, a man about to mount a horse, and several canoes, 
one surmounted by the image of a bird. All this tells that 
the chief called King-fisher made an expedition of three 
days across a lake, and arriving safely on land, mounted his 
horse. The new element introduced into this picture is 
symbolism, the same that transformed the homely system of 
tallies into the Scythian's graceful living message to 
Darius. It shows the excess of thought over the power 
of expression, which will soon necessitate a new form. 
The tortoise is used as a symbol of dry land. The arch is, 
of course, the sky, and the three suns in it mean three 
days. The artist who devised these ways of expressing his 
thought was on the verge of picture-writing, which is the 
next stage in the upward progress of the art of recording 
events, and the stage at which some nations have terminated 
their efforts. 

Picture-writing differs from picturing in that it aims at 
conveying to the mind, not a representation of an event, 

but a narrative of the event in words, each 

, , . , , . „ Picture- 

word being represented by a picture. The wr i t i ng . 

distinction is of immense importance. The 

step from the former to the latter is one of the greatest 

which mankind has ever made in the course of its 

progress in civilization. When the step had been made 

the road toward the acquisition of a regular alphabet lay 

comparatively open. It was still beset with difficulties, but 

none so great as the difficulty of making this particular step. 

Let us try and fully understand this. We will take a 

sentence and see how it might be conveyed by the two 

methods. A man slew a lion with a bow and arrows while 

u 



290 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

the sun went down. Picturing would show the man with 
a drawn bow in his hand, the lion struck by the arrow, 
the sun on the horizon. Picture-writing would present a 
series of little pictures and symbols dealing separately with 
each word — a man, a symbol for ' slew,' say a hand smiting, 
a lion, a connecting symbol for ' with,' and so on. We see 
at once how much more elaborate and exact the second 
method is, and that it makes the telling of a continuous 
story possible. We also discover that these various stages 
of writing correspond to developments of language, and 
that as languages grow in capacity to express nobler 
thoughts, a greater stress will be put upon invention to 
render the more recondite words by pictures and symbols, 
till at last language will outgrow all possibility of being so 
rendered, and another method of showing words to the eye 
will have to be thought of — for all languages at least that 
attain their full development. That a great deal may be 
expressed by pictures and symbols, however, we learn from 
the picturing and picture-writing of past races that have 
come down to us, and from the present writing of the 
Chinese, who with their radical language have preserved 
the pictorial character that well accords with an early stage 
of language. 

The Red Indians of North America have invented some 
very ingenious methods of picturing time and numbers. 
They have names for the thirteen moons or months into 
which they divide the year — Whirlwind moon, moon when 
the leaves fall off, moon when the fowls go to the south, 
etc., and when a hunter setting forth on a long expedition 
wished to leave a record of the time of his departure 
for a friend who should follow him on the same track, he 
carved on the bark of a tree a picture of the name of the 
moon, accompanied with such an exact representation of 



PICTURE-WRITING. 291 

the state of the moon in the heavens on the night when 
he set out, that his friends had no difficulty in reading 
the date correctly. The Indians of Virginia kept a record 
of events in the form of a series of wheels of sixty spokes, 
each wheel representing the life of a man, sixty years being 
the average life of a man among the Indians. The spokes 
meant years, and on each one a picture of the principal 
occurrences of the year was drawn. 

A missionary who accompanied Penn to Pennsylvania 
says that he saw a wheel, on one spoke of which the first 
arrival of Europeans in America was recorded. The history 
of this disastrous event for the Indians was given by a 
picture of a white swan spitting fire from its mouth. The 
swan, being a water-bird, told that the strangers came over 
the sea, its white plumage recalled the colour of their faces, 
and fire issuing from its mouth represented fire-arms, the pos- 
session of which had made them conquerors. The North 
American Indians also use rude little pictures, rough writing 
we may call it, to help them to remember songs and charms. 
Each verse of a song is concentrated into a little picture, 
the sight of which recalls the words to one who has once 
learned it. A drawing of a little man, with four marks on 
his legs and two on his breast, recalls the adverse charm, 
1 Two days must you fast, my friend, four days must you 
sit still.' A picture of a circle with a figure in the middle 
represents a verse of a love-song, and says to the initiated, 
'Were she on a distant island I could make her swim 
over.' This sort of picturing seems to be very near 
writing, for it serves to recall words — but still only to recall 
them — it would not suggest the words to those who had 
never heard the song before ; it is only an aid to memory, 
and its employers have only as yet taken the first step in 
the great discovery we are speaking of. The Mexicans, 



292 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

though they had attained to much greater skill than this in 
the drawing and colouring of pictures, had not progressed 
much further in the invention. Their picture-scrolls do not 
seem ever to have been more than an elaborate system of 
mnemonics, which, hardly less than the Peruvian quipus, 
required a race of interpreters to hand down their meaning 
from one generation to another. This fact makes us 
regret somewhat less keenly the decision of the first Spanish 
archbishop sent to Mexico, who, on being informed of the 
great store of vellum rolls, and folds on folds of cloth 
covered w T ith paintings, that had been discovered at Anahuac, 
the chief seat of Mexican learning, ordered the entire collec- 
tion to be burnt in a heap — a mountain heap, the chroniclers 
of the time call it — lest they should contain incantations or 
instructions for the practice of magical arts. As some 
excuse for this notion of the archbishop's, we will mention 
the subjects treated of in the five books of picture-writing 
which Montezuma gave to Cortez : — the first book treated 
of years and seasons ; the second of days and festivals ; the 
third of dreams and omens ; the fourth of the naming of 
children ; the fifth of ceremonies and prognostications. 

The few specimens of Mexican writing which have come 
down to us, show that, though the Aztecs had not used 
their picture-signs as skilfully as some other nations have 
done, they had taken the first step towards phonetic, or 
sound-writing; a step which, if pursued, would have led 
them through some such process as we shall afterwards see 
was followed by the Egyptians and Phoenicians, to the for- 
mation of a true alphabet. They had begun to write 
proper names of chiefs and towns by pictures of things that 
recalled the sound of their names, instead of by a symbol 
suggestive of the appearance or quality of the place or 
chieftain, or of the meaning of the names. It is difficult to 



PICTURE-WRITING. 293 

explain this without pictures ; but as this change of method 
involves a most important step in the discovery of the art 
of writing, we had better pause upon it a little, and get it 
clear to our minds. There was a king whose name occurs 
in a chronicle now existing, called Itz-co-atle, Knife-snake ; 
his name is generally written by a picture of a snake, with 
flint knives stuck in it ; but in one place it is indicated in a 
different manner. The first syllable is still pictured by a 
knife ; but for the second, instead of a snake, we find an 
earthen pot and a sign for water. Now the Mexican name 
for pot is ' co-mitle,' for water ' atle ; ' read literally the 
name thus pictured would read ' Itz-comitle-atle,' but it is 
clear, since the name intended was ' Itz-co-atle/ that the 
pot is drawn to suggest only the first syllable of its name, co, 
and by this change it has become no longer a picture, but 
a phonetic, syllabic sign, the next step but one before a 
true letter. What great results can be elaborated from this 
change we shall see when we begin to speak of Egyptian 
writing. 

We must not leave picture-writing till we have said some- 
thing about the Chinese character, in which we find the 
highest development of which direct representation of things 
appears capable. Though we should not think it, while 
looking at the characters on a Chinese tea-paper or box, 
every one of those groups of black strokes and dots which 
seem so shapeless to our eyes is a picture of an object ; not 
a picture of the sound of its name, as our written words are, 
but a representation real or symbolic of the thing itself. 
Early specimens of Chinese writing show these groups of 
strokes in a stage when a greater degree of resemblance to 
the thing signified is preserved ; but the exigencies of quick 
writing, among a people who write and read a great deal, 
have gradually reduced the pictures more and more to the 



294 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

condition of arbitrary signs, whose connection with the 
things signified must be a matter of habit and memory. 
The task of learning a sign for every word of the language 
in place of conquering the art of spelling does seem, at first 
sight, to put Chinese children in a pitiable condition, as 
compared with ourselves, To lessen our compassion, we 
may recall that the Chinese language is still in a primitive 
condition, and therefore comprehends very much fewer 
distinct sounds than do the languages we know, the same 
sound being used to express meanings by a difference in in- 
tonation. This difference could not easily be given in 
writing ; it is therefore, with the Chinese, almost a necessity 
to recall to the mind the thing itself instead of its name. 

Beside the ordinary pictorial signs which convey a direct 
and simple idea to the mind, men must in pictorial writing 

need a great number of signs for ideas which 
Ideographs. . . . . , _ 

cannot be pictured. All abstract ideas, for in- 
stance, come under this head. But even some things 
which could themselves be drawn are not always so 
portrayed. When a symbol, and not a direct picture, is 
used for the thing or idea represented we call the symbol 
an ideograph. We see, then, that pictorial signs may be 
used in several different ways, sometimes as real pictures, 
sometimes as ideographs, which again may be divided 
into groups as they are used — (i) metaphorically, as a 
bee for industry ; (2) enigmatically, as, among the 
Egyptians, an ostrich feather is used as a symbol of 
justice, because all the plumes in the wing of this bird 
were supposed to be of equal length ; (3) by syndoche — 
putting a part for the whole, — as two eyeballs for eyes ; (4) 
by metonomy — putting cause for effect, — as a tree for 
shadow ; the disk of the sun for a day, etc. This system of 
writing in pictures and symbols requires so much ingenuity, 



DETERMINATIVE SIGNS. 295 

such hosts of pretty poetic inventions, that perhaps there is 

less dulness than would at first appear in getting the Chinese 

alphabet of some six thousand signs or so by heart. We 

will mention a few Chinese ideographs in illustration. The 

sign for a man placed over the sign for a mountain peak 

signifies a hermit ; the sign for a mouth and that for a bird 

placed side by side signify the act of singing; a hand 

holding a sweeping-brush is a woman ; a man seated on the 

ground, a son (showing the respectful position assigned to 

children in China) ; an ear at the opening of a door means 

curiosity; two eyes squinting towards the nose mean to 

observe carefully ; one eye squinting symbolises the colour 

white, because so much of the white of the eye is shown 

when the ball is in that position ; a mouth at an open door 

is a note of interrogation, and also the verb to question. 

Even Chinese writing, however, has not remained purely 

ideographic. Some of the signs are used phonetically to 

picture sound, and this use must necessarily 

grow now that intercourse with Western nations ' . 
f . . tive signs. 

introduces new names, new inventions, and new 
ideas, which, somehow or other, must get themselves repre- 
sented in the Chinese language and writing. 

The invention of determinative signs — characters put be- 
side the word to show what class of objects a word belongs 
to — helps the Chinese to overcome some of the difficulties 
which their radical language offers to the introduction of 
sound-writing. For example, the word 'Pa' has eight 
different meanings, and when it is written phonetically, a 
reader would have to choose between eight objects to which 
he might apply it, if there were not a determinative sign by 
its side which gives him a hint how to read it. This is 
as if when we wrote the word ' vessel ' we were to add ' navi- 
gation' when we intended a ship; and ' household' when 



296 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

we meant a jug or puncheon. The Chinese determinative 
signs are not, however, left to each writer's fancy. Two 
hundred and fourteen signs (originally themselves pictures, 
remember) have been chosen out, and are always used in 
this way. The classes into which objects are divided by 
these numerous signs are minute, and do not appear to 
follow any scientific method or arrangement. There is a 
sign to show that a written word belongs to the class noses, 
another for rats, another for frogs, another for tortoises. 
One is inclined to think that the helpful signs must be as 
hard to remember as the words themselves, and that they 
can only be another element in the general confusion. 
Probably their frequent recurrence makes them soon be- 
come familiar to Chinese readers, and they act as finger- 
posts to guide the thoughts into the right direction. 
Determinative signs have always come in to help in the 
transitional stage between purely ideographic and purely 
phonetic writing, and were used by both Egyptians and 
Assyrians in their elaborate systems as soon as the phonetic 
principle began to be employed among their ideographs. 

It is an interesting fact that the Japanese have dealt with 
the Chinese system of writing precisely as did the Phoe- 
nicians with the Egyptian hieroglyphics. They have chosen 
forty-seven signs from the many thousands employed by the 
Chinese, and they use them phonetically only; that is to 
say, as true sound-carrying letters. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

PHONETIC WRITING. 

The step from picturing or picture-drawing to writing by 
pictures is, as we have said, an immense one. But now we 
have to record one more step, almost as great, Transition 
which is the transition from the picturing of to phonetic 
single things — or, if you wish, single ideas — to writing. 
the picturing, not of ideas at all, but of sounds merely. 
This is the step we have now to follow out, to trace the 
process through which picture-writing passed into sound- 
writing, and to find out how signs (for we shall see they 
are the same signs) which were originally meant to recall 
objects to the eye, have ended in being used to suggest, 
or, shall we say, picture, sounds to the ear. This is what 
we mean by phonetic writing. A written word, let us re- 
member, is the picture of a sound, and it is our business 
to hunt the letters of which it is formed through the 
changes they must have undergone while they were taking 
upon themselves the new office of suggesting sound. We 
said, too, that we must not expect to find any written 
account of this change, and that it is only by examining 
the forms of the records of other events that this greatest 
event of literature can be made out. What we want is 
to see the pictorial signs, while busy in telling us other 



298 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

history, beginning to perform their new duties side by side 
with the old, so that we may be sure of their identity ; and 
this opportunity is afforded us by the hieroglyphic writing 
of the ancient Egyptians, who, being people disposed to 
cling to everything that had once been done, never alto- 
gether left off employing their first methods, even after they 
had taken another and yet another step towards a more 
perfect system of writing ; but carried on the old ways and 
the new improvements side by side. The nature of their 
language, which was in part radical and in part inflexional, 
was one cause of this intermixture of methods in their writ- 
ing; it had partly but not entirely outgrown the stage in 
which picture-signs are most useful. Ideograph is the proper 
name for a picture-sign, which, as soon as picture-writing 
supersedes picturing, becomes the sign for a thought quite 
as often as it is the sign for an object. Very ancient as are 
the earliest Egyptian records, we have none which belong 
to the time when the invention of writing was in the stage 
of picturing; we only conjecture that it passed through this 
earliest stage by finding examples of picturing mixed with 
their other kinds of writing. Each chapter of the Ritual, 
the oldest of Egyptian books, has one or more designs at 
its head, in which the contents of the chapter are very 
carefully and ingeniously pictured ; and the records of royal 
triumphs and progresses which are cut out on temple and 
palace walls in ideographic and phonetic signs, are always 
prefaced by a large picture which tells the same story in the 
primitive method of picturing without words. 

The next stage of the invention, ideographic writing, the 
ancient Egyptians carried to great perfection, 

g T phan and reduced to a careful system. The signs 
writing. . J ° 

for ideas became fixed, and were not chosen 

according to each writer's fancy. Every picture had its 



EGYPTIAN WRITING. 299 

settled value, and was always used in the same way. A 
sort of alphabet of ideographs was thus formed. A heart 
drawn in a certain way always meant ' love/ an eye with 
a tear on the lash meant ' grief/ two hands holding a shield 
and spear meant the verb 'to fight/ a tongue meant 'to 
speak/ a footprint ' to travel/ a man kneeling on the ground 
signified 'a conquered enemy/ etc. Conjunctions and 
prepositions had their fixed pictures, as well as verbs and 
nouns ; * also ' was pictured by a coil of rope with a second 
band across it, ' and ' by a coil of rope with an arm across 
it, 'over' by a circle surmounting a square, 'at' by the 
picture of a hart reposing near the sign for water — a 
significant picture for such a little word, which recalls to 
our minds the Psalm, ' As the hart panteth after the water- 
brooks/ and leads us to wonder whether the writer were 
familiar with the Egyptian hieroglyph. 

So much was done in this way, that we almost wonder 
how the need for another method came to be felt ; perhaps 
a peculiarity of the Egyptian language helped the splendid 
thought of picturing sound to flash one happy day into the 
mind of some priest, when he was laboriously cutting his 
sacred sentence into a temple wall. The language of 
ancient Egypt, like that of China, had a great many words 
alike in sound but different in meaning, and it could not 
fail to happen that some of these words with two meanings 
would indicate a thing easy to draw, and a thought difficult 
to symbolize ; for example, the ancient Egyptian word neb 
means a basket and a ruler ; and nefer means a lute and 
goodness. There would come a day when a clever priest, 
cutting a record on a wall, would bethink him of putting 
a lute instead of the more elaborate symbol that had hitherto 
been used for goodness. It was a simple change, and 
migKt not have struck any one at the time as involving more 



300 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

than the saving of a little trouble to hieroglyphists, but it 
was the germ out of which our system of writing sprang. 
The priest who did that had taken the first step towards 
picturing sound, and cut a true phonetic sign — the true if 
remote parent } in fact, of one of the twenty-four letters of 
our own alphabet. 

Let us consider how the thought would probably grow. 
The writers once started on the road of making signs stand 
for sounds would observe how much fewer sounds there are 
than objects and ideas, and that words even when unlike 
are composed of the same sounds pronounced in different 
succession. If we were employed in painting up a notice 
on a wall, and intended to use ideographs instead of letters, 
and moreover if the words manage, mansion, manly, mantles, 
came into our sentence, should we not begin each of these 
words by a figure of a man ? and again, if we had to write 
treacle, treason, treaty, we should begin each with a picture 
of a tree; we should find it easier to use the same sign 
often for part of a word, than to invent a fresh symbol 
for each entire word as we wrote it. For the remaining 
syllables of the words we had so successfully begun we 
should have to invent other signs, and we should perhaps 
soon discover that in each syllable there were in fact several 
sounds, or movements of lips or tongue, and that the same 
sounds differently combined came over and over again in 
all our words. Then we might go on to discover exactly 
how many movements of the speaking organs occurred in 
ordinary speech, and the thought of choosing a particular 
picture to represent each movement might occur; we should 
then have invented an alphabet in its earliest form. 
That was the road along which the ancient Egyptians 
travelled, but they progressed very slowly, and never quite 
reached its end. They began by having syllabic signs for 



EGYPTIAN WRITING. 301 

proper names. Osiri was a name that occurred frequently 
in their sacred writings, and they happened to have two 
words in their language which made up its sound — Os sl 
throne, iri an eye. Hence a small picture of a throne came 
to be the syllabic sign for the sound os, the oval of an eye 
for the sound iri ; in like manner Totro, the name of an 
early king, was written by a hand Tot and a circle ro, and 
thus a system of spelling by syllables was established. Later 
they began to divide syllables into movements of the speak- 
ing organs, and to represent these movements by drawing 
objects whose name began with the movement intended. 
For example, a picture of a lion (labo) was drawn, not for 
the whole sound (labo), but for the liquid I; an owl (mulag) 
stood for the labial m; a water-jug (nem) for n. They had 
now, in fact, invented letters ; but though they had made the 
great discovery they did not use it in the best way. They 
could not make up their minds to keep to phonetic writing, 
and throw away their pictures and ideographs. They con- 
tinued to mix all these methods together, so that when they 
painted a lion — it might be a picture and mean lion, it 
might be a symbolic sign and medio, pre-eminence, or it might 
be a true letter and stand for the liquid /. The Egyptians 
were obliged to invent a whole army of determinative 
signs, like those now employed by the Chinese, which they 
placed before their pictures to show when a group was to 
be read according to its sound, when it was used symboli- 
cally, and when it was a simple representation of the object 
intended. 

We have already pointed out how among the Egyptian 

monuments, the sculptures on the tombs and temples, and 

• in many of the more important papyri — as, for example, 

their Book of the Dead itself — we have specimens of all 

thethree methods by which ideas may be conveyed to the 



302 THE DAWN OF HISTORY, 

eye. We have first the picture of some event — the king, 
say, offering sacrifice to a god, — then we have each separate 
word of the sentence first recorded by ideographs, then 
spelled by ordinary letters. 

Another source of difficulty in deciphering the writing of 
the ancient Egyptians, is that they were not content with 
a single sign for a single sound ; they had a great many 
different pictures for each letter, and used them in fanciful 
ways. For example, if / occurred in the name of a king 
or god, they would use the lion-picture to express it, think- 
ing it appropriate ; but if the same sound occurred in the 
name of a queen, they would use a lotus-lily as more femi- 
nine and elegant. They had as many as twenty different 
pictures which could be used for the first letter of our 
alphabet #, and thirty for the letter h, one of which closely 
resembles our capital H in form, being two upright palm- 
branches held by two arms which make the cross of the H. 
No letter had fewer than five pictures to express its sound, 
from which the writer might choose according to his fancy ; 
or perhaps, sometimes, according to the space he had to fill 
up on the wall, or obelisk, where he was writing, and the 
effect in form and colour he wished his sentence to produce. 
Then again, all their letters were not quite true letters 
(single breathings). The Egyptians never got quite clear 
about vowels and consonants, and generally spelt words 
(unless they began with a vowel sound) by consonants only, 
the consonants carrying a vowel breathing as well as their 
own sound, and thus being syllabic signs instead of true 
letters. 

Since much of the writing of the ancient Egyptians was 
used ornamentally as decoration for the walls of their houses 
and temples, and took with them the place of the tapestry 
of later times, the space required to carry out their complex 



HIERATIC AND DEMOTIC WRITING. 303 

system of writing was no objection to it in their eyes ; neither 
did they care much about the difficulty of learning so elabo- 
rate an array of signs, as for many centuries the art of read- 
ing and writing was almost entirely confined to an order of 
priests whose occupation and glory it was. When writing 
became more common, and was used for ordinary as well 
as sacred purposes, the pictorial element disappeared from 
some of their styles of writing, and quick ways of making the 
pictures were invented, which reduced them to as completely 
arbitrary signs, with no resemblance to the objects intended, 
as the Chinese signs now are. 

The ancient Egyptians had two ways of quick writing, the 
Hieratic (or priestly), which was employed for the sacred 
writings only, and the Demotic, used by the Hieratic and 
people, which was employed for law-papers, Demotic 
letters, and all wri y ■ that did not touch on writing, 
religious matter or enter into the province of the priest. 
Yet, though literature increased and writing was much 
practised by people engaged in the ordinary business of 
life (we see pictures on the tombs of the great man's 
upper servant seated before his desk and recording with 
reed-pen and ink-horn the numbers of the flocks and herds 
belonging to the farm), little was done to simplify the 
art of writing by the ancient Egyptians. Down to the latest 
times when Hieroglyphics were cut, and Demotic and 
Hieratic characters written, the same confusing variety of 
signs were employed — pictorial, ideographic, symbolic, pho- 
netic — all mixed up together, with nothing to distinguish 
them but the determinative signs before spoken of, which 
themselves added a new element to the complexity. ■ 

It was left for a less conservative and more enterprising 
people than the ancient Egyptians to take the last and 
greatest step in perfecting the invention which the ancient 



304 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

Egyptians had brought so far on its road, and by throwing 
away all the first attempts, to allow the serviceable, success- 

The Phoe- ^ P arts of the system to stand out clear. The 
nician Phoenicians, to whom tradition points as the 

alphabet, introducers of our alphabet into Europe, and 
who, during early ages, were in very close political and 
trading connection with the ancient Egyptians, are now 
believed to be the authors of the improvement by which 
we benefit. They did not invent the alphabet which the 
Greeks learned from them ; they could have had no reason 
to invent signs, when they must have been well acquainted 
with the superabundance that had been in use for centuries 
before they began to build their cities by the sea-shore. 
What they probably did was to choose from the Egyptian 
characters, with which all the traders of the world must have 
been familiar, just so many phon or sound-carrying 

signs as represented the sounds of \viiich their speech was 
made up ; and rejecting all others, they kept strictly to these 
chosen ones in all their future writings. This was a great 
work to have accomplished, and we must not suppose that it 
was done by one man, or even in one generation ; as probably 
it took a very long time to perfect the separation between 
vowels and consonants : a distinction which had already 
been made by the ancient Egyptians, for they had vowel 
signs, though, as before remarked, they constantly made 
their consonants carry the vowels, and spelt words with con- 
sonants alone. You will remember that consonants are the 
most important elements of language, and constitute, as we 
have said before, the bones of words ; but also that distinc- 
tions of time, person, and case depend in an early stage of 
language very much on vowels ; and you will therefore under- 
stand how important to clearness of expression it was to 
have clearly defined separate signs for the vowels and diph- 



THE PHOENICIAN ALPHABET. 305 

thongs that had, so to speak, all the exactitude of meaning in 
their keeping. The Phoenicians, of all the people in the early 
world, were most in need of a clear and precise method of 
writing : for, being the great traders and settlers of ancient 
times, one of its principal uses would be to enable them to 
communicate with friends at a distance by means of writings 
which should convey the thoughts of the absent ones, or the 
private instructions of a trader to his partner without need 
of an interpreter. 

The advantages of simplicity and clearness had been less 
felt by Egyptian priests while inscribing their stately records 
on walls of temples and palaces, and on the tapering sides 
of obelisks which were meant to lift sacred words up to the 
eye of Heaven rather than to expose them to those of men. 
They believed that a race of priests would continue, as long 
as the temples and obelisks continued, who could explain 
the writing to those worthy to enter into its mysteries ; and 
they were not sorry, perhaps, to keep the distinction of 
understanding the art of letters to their own caste. 

It was not till letters were needed by busy people, who 
had other things to do besides studying, that the necessity 
for making them easy to learn, and really effective as carriers 
of thought across distances, was sincerely felt. Two con- 
jectures as to the method pursued by the Phoenicians in 
choosing their letters and adapting them to their own 
language have been made by the learned. One is, that 
while they took the forms of their letters from the Egyptian 
system of signs, and adopted the principle of making each 
picture of an object stand for the first sound of its name, as 
labo for /, they did not give to each letter the value it had 
in the Egyptian alphabet, but allowed it to mean for them 
the first sound of its name in their own language. For 
example, they took the sign for an ox's head and made it 

x 



306 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

stand for the sound a, not because it was one of the Egyptian 
signs for ' a ' but because Aleph was the name for an ox 
and ' a ' was its first syllable. This, which seems a natural 
method enough, is, however, not the method which was 
followed by the Japanese in choosing their alphabet from 
signs; and more recent investigations prove such a close 
resemblance between the earliest forms of Phoenician letters, 
and early forms of signs for the same sounds in Hieratic 
character, that a complete descent in sound-bearing power, 
as well as in form, is now claimed for our letters from those 
hieroglyphics, which, in our ignorance of the relationship, 
we used to consider a synonymous term for something unin- 
telligible. The Semitic language spoken by the Phoenicians 
was richer in sounds than the less developed language 
spoken by the ancient Egyptians ; but as the Egyptians 
used several signs for each letter, the Phoenicians easily fell 
into the habit of giving a slightly different value to two forms 
originally identical, and thus provided for all the more deli- 
cate distinctions of their tongue. A close comparison- of 
the forms of the letters of the earliest known Canaanite in- 
scriptions with Hieratic writing of the time of the Old 
Empire reveals a resemblance so striking between fifteen of 
the Phoenician letters and Hieratic characters carrying the 
same sounds, that a conviction of the derivation of one from 
the other impresses itself on even a careless observer. The 
correspondence of the other five Canaanite letters with their 
Hieratic counterparts is less obvious to the uneducated eye, 
but experts in such investigations see sufficient likeness even 
there to confirm the theory. 

The gradual divergence of the Phoenician characters from 
their Hieratic parents is easily accounted for by the differ- 
ence of the material and the instrument employed by the 
Phoenicians and Egyptians in writing. The Hieratic cha~ 



THE PHCENIC1AN ALPHABET. 307 

racter was painted by Egyptian priests on smooth papyrus 
leaves with a brush or broad pointed reed pen. The 
Canaanite inscriptions are graven with a sharp instrument 
on hard stone, and as a natural consequence the round 
curves of the Hieratic character become sharp points, and 
there is a general simplification of form and a throwing 
aside of useless lines and dots, the last remnants of the 
picture from which each Hieratic character originally sprang. 
The names given later to the Phoenician letters, Aleph, 
an ' ox ; ' Beth, a ' house ; ' Gimel, a ' camel ; ' Daleth, a 
Moor;' are not the names of the objects from which the 
forms of these letters were originally taken. The Hieratic 
* A ' was taken from the picture of an eagle, which stood for 
' A ' in hieroglyphics ; ' B ' was originally a sort of heron ; 
1 D,' a hand with the fingers spread out New names were 
given by the Phoenicians to the forms they had borrowed, 
from fancied resemblances to objects which, in their language, 
began with the sound intended, when the original Egyptian 
names had been forgotten. It is hard for us to see a like- 
ness between our letter ' A ' and an ox's horns with a yoke 
across ; or between ' B ' and the ground-plan of a house ; 
' G ' and a camel's head and neck ; ' M ' and water ; 
' W ' and a set of teeth ; ' P ' and the back of a head set 
on the neck ; but our letters have gone through a great deal 
of straightening and putting into order since they came into 
Europe and were sent out on their further westward travels. 
The reader who has an opportunity of examining early 
specimens of letters on Greek coins will find a freedom of 
treatment which makes them much more suggestive of re- 
semblances, and the earlier Phoenician letters were, no 
doubt, more pictorial still. The interesting and important 
thing, to be remembered concerning our letters is that each 
one of them was, without doubt, a picture once, and gets 



3 o8 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

its shape in no other way than by having once stood for an 
object, whose name in the ancient people's language began 
with the sound it conveys to us. 

These Phoenician letters, born on the walls of Egyptian 
tombs older than Abraham, and selected by Phoenician 
traders who took their boats up to Memphis at or before 
Joseph's time, are the parents of all the alphabets now used 
in the world, with the exception of that one which the 
Japanese have taken from Chinese picture-writing. The 
Phoenicians carried their alphabet about with them to all the 
countries where they planted trading settlements, and it was 
adopted by Greeks, and by the Latins from the Greeks, and 
then gradually modified to suit the languages of all the 
civilized peoples of east and west. 1 The Hebrew square 
letters are a form of divergence from the original type, and 
even the Sanskrit character in all its various styles can be 
traced back to the same source by experts who have studied 
the transformations through which it has passed in the 
course of ages. It is, of course, easy to understand that 
these ubiquitous little shapes which through so many 
centuries have had the task laid on them of spelling words 
in so many different languages must have undergone some 
variations in their values to suit the tongues that interpreted 
them. 

The original family of twenty letters have not always kept 
together, or avoided the intrusion of new comers. Some of 
the languages they have had to express, being in an early 

1 It is interesting to note that one of the proofs that the Greek 
alphabet is derived from the Phoenician is precisely similar to the 
proof that the Sanskrit Dydus or duhitar are earlier forms than Zeus or 
daughter. Because in Greek alphabet means only alpha (a) beta (£), 
but in Phoenician alpha or aleph and beta or beth have distinct meanings 
— ' ox ' and ' house ' — the objects supposed to be symbolized by the first 
two Phoenician letters. See above. 



RUNES— ADDITIONAL LETTERS. 



3o9 



stage of development, have not wanted even so many as 

twenty letters, and have gradually allowed some of them to 

fall into disuse and be forgotten; an instance 

of this we find in the alphabet of the northern 

nations — the Gothic — which consisted only of sixteen 

runes — called by new names ; they have been handed 

down either directly from the Greek, or from the Greek 

through the Roman alphabet, and furnished with mystic 

meanings and with names peculiar to themselves. 

In languages where nicer distinctions of sound were called 

for than the original twenty Phoenician signs carried, a few 

fresh letters were added, but in no case has 

any quite new form been invented. The added , ltlonal 
11 1 1 ,-r r letters, 

letters have always been a modification of one 

of the older forms — either a letter cut in half, or one modi- 
fied by an additional stroke or dot. In this way the 
Romans made G out of C, by adding a stroke to one of 
its horns* V and U, I and J were originally slightly 
different ways of writing one letter, which have been taken 
advantage of to express a new sound when the necessity 
for a greater number of sound-signs arose; TV, as its 
very name shows, is only a doubled form of V. At first 
sight it seems a simple thing enough to invent a letter, but 
let us remember that such a thing as an arbitrarily invented 
letter does not exist anywhere. To create one out of 
nothing is a feat of which human ingenuity does not seem 
capable. Every single letter in use anywhere (we can hardly 
dwell on this thought too long) has descended in regular 
steps from the pictured object in whose name the sound it 
represents originally dwelt. Shape and sound were wedded 
together in early days by the first beginners of writing, and 
all the labour bestowed on them since has only been in the 
way of modification and adaptation to changed circum- 



3 io THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

stances. No wonder that, when people believed a whole 
alphabet to have been invented straight off, they also thought 
that it took a god to do it. Thoth, the Great-and-great, 
with his emblems of justice and his recording pencil; 
Oannes, the Sea-monster, to whom all the wonders of the 
under-world lay open; Swift Hermes, with his cap of 
invisibility and his magic staff; One-eyed Odin, while his 
dearly purchased draught of wisdom-water was inspiring him 
still. No one indeed — as we see plainly enough now — but 
a hero like one of these, was equal to the task of inventing 
an alphabet. 

Before we have quite done with alphabets, we ought to 
speak of another system of ancient writing, the cuneiform ; 

which, though it has left no trace of itself on 
Cuneiform modern alphabets, is the vehicle which pre- 
writing. , , • • • 

serves some of the most interesting and ancient 

records in the world. The cuneiform or arrow-shaped 
character used by the ancient Chaldeans, Assyrians, Baby- 
lonians, and Persians, is supposed to owe its peculiar form 
to the material on which it was habitually graven by 
those who employed it. It arose in a country where the 
temples were built of unburned brick instead of stone, 
and the wedge-shaped form of the lines composing the 
letters is precisely what would be most easily produced 
on wet clay by the insertion and rapid withdrawal of a 
blunt-pointed stick or reed. Like all other systems, it 
began in rude pictures, which gradually came to have a 
phonetic value, in the same manner as did the Egyptian 
heiroglyphics. The earliest records in this character are 
graven on the unburned bricks of pyramidal-shaped temples, 
which a little before the time of Abraham began to be built 
by a nation composed of mixed Shemite, Cushite, and 
Scythian {i.e. Turanian) peoples round the shores of the 



CUNEIFORM WRITING. 311 

Persian Gulf. The invention of the character is ascribed 
in the records to the Turanian race, the Accadians, who 
are always designated by the sign of a wedge, which was 
equivalent to calling them the writers, or the literary people. 
The Accadians discovered this writing; but it was taken 
up and wrought to much greater perfection by their suc- 
cessors, the Shemites. In their hands it became the 
vehicle in which the history of the two great empires of 
Babylon and Nineveh, and the achievements of ancient 
Persian kings, have come down to us. For when Nineveh 
fell before the Persians, they adopted the cuneiform writing 
of the Assyrians. 

We have all seen and wondered at the minute writing 
on the Assyrian marbles and tablets in the British Museum, 
and stood in awe before the human-headed monster gods — 

* Their flanks with dark runes fretted o'er,' 

whose fate, in surviving the ruin of so many empires, and 
being brought from so far to enlighten us on the history of 
past ages, can never cease to astonish us. When we look 
at them again, let us spare a thought to the history of the 
character itself. Its mysteries have cost even greater labour 
to unravel than hieroglyphics themselves. To the latest 
times of the use of cuneiform by the Achaemenidae, pictorial, 
symbolic, and phonetic groups continued to be mixed 
together, and a system of determinative signs was employed 
to show the reader in what sense each word was to be 
taken. But this system of writing never reached the per- 
fection attained by the Egyptian hieroglyphs. It never 
advanced to the use of what may be called true letters, 
never beyond the use of syllabic signs. So that in time it 
was superseded by alphabets descended from the Egyptian. 
The symbolism, too, of the cuneiform writing is very 



312 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

complex, and the difficulty of reading the signs used pho- 
netically is greatly increased by the fact of the language 
from which they acquired their values (a Turanian one) 
being different from the Semitic tongue, in which the most 
important records are written. 

Of other systems of writing, chiefly pictorial, known in 
the ancient world, such as the Hittite and the Cypriot — 
or, again, of the picture-writing of many other savage tribes 
beside the North American Indians, it is not necessary to 
speak. For we are not writing a history of alphabets, but 
of the acquisition of the art of writing by mankind. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

CONCLUSION. 

At this point, where we are bringing our inquiries to a con- 
clusion, we would fain look a little nearer into the mists 
which shroud the past, and descry, were it Vortices of 
possible, the actual dawn of history for the national 
individual nations; would see, not only how llfe - 
the larger bodies of men have travelled through the pre- 
historic stages of their journey, but how, having reached 
its settled home, each people begins to emerge from the 
obscurity that surrounds its early days. What were the 
exact means, we ask, whereby a collection of nomadic or 
half-nomadic tribes separated, reunited, separated again, 
and developed upon different soils the qualities which dis- 
tinguish them from all others ? What is, in fact, the begin- 
ning of real national life ? 

The worlds which circle round the sun, or rather, the 
multitudinous systems of orbs which fill space, might pose a 
like inquiry. There was a time when these which are now 
distinct worlds were confounded as a continuous nebula, a 
thin vapour of matter whirling round in one unchanging 
circle. In time, their motion became less uniform, vortices 
— as the word is — set in, smaller bodies of vaporous matter 
which, still obeying the universal movement, set up internal 



314 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

motions among themselves, and cooling, separated into 
separate orbs. How like is all this process to the history of 
nations ! These, confounded once together in one unstable 
mass of wandering tribes, have in like manner separated 
from their nebulous brethren, and, setting up their internal 
vortices, have coalesced into nations. And yet as a system 
of planets, albeit with their own distinctive motions, do all 
revolve in one direction round one central force, so the 
different families of nations, which we may call the planets 
of a system, seem in like manner compelled by a power 
external to themselves in one particular course to play a 
particular part in the world's history. The early stone-age 
Turanians, the Cushite civilizers of Egypt and Chaldaea, the 
Semitic people, may all be looked upon as different systems 
of nations, each with its mission to the human race. Thus, 
too, the Aryan people, after they had once become so 
separated as to lose all family remembrance, are found 
working together to accomplish an assigned destiny, mi- 
grating in every direction, and carrying with them every- 
where the seeds of a higher civilization. 

The rays of history are seen gradually spreading from 
Egypt up through Mesopotamia to the nations of Palestine — 
not yet the land of the Hebrews — then to Asia Minor, and 
so to Greece. That is the land-root of civilization. We are 
speaking rather of succession in time than of actual suc- 
cession by inheritance. We cannot tell, at any rate, that 
Chaldaea was in any way indebted to Egypt for its early 
civilization, or Egypt to Chaldaea. But with the exception 
of that blank, the rest of the progress of civilization by 
inheritance does follow pretty clearly. The Assyrian 
Empire inherited from the old Babylonian Empire. And 
the nations of Palestine inherited from Egypt and Assyria 
both. On the borders of Asia Minor were two peoples 



VORTICES OF NATIONAL LIFE. 315 

who commanded — for a time, at any rate — the trade routes 
from Palestine and Mesopotamia into Asia Minor. These 
two peoples were the Hittites x and the Phoenicians. One 
commanded the trade route by land, the other commanded 
it by sea. Of the first we know at present very little — 
little more than that they had a capital at Karkemish ; that 
they commanded the navigation of the Orontes and the 
Upper Euphrates ; and that they were at one time strong 
enough to stand at the head of a confederation of peoples 
who made war upon Egypt when at the summit of her power. 
There can be little doubt that the Hittites passed on to the 
peoples of Asia Minor, who were in blood nearly allied to 
the Greeks, some of the civilization of the Semitic peoples 
farther south, and that these peoples passed the same on to 
the Greeks of Asia Minor. 

But of course the Phoenicians must still be reckoned as 
the great transporters of civilization from Egypt and from 
Asia to the rest of the world. They could hardly be said to 
possess a country ; but they possessed cities of vast import- 
ance and no small magnificence along the coast of Palestine 
— Lamyra, Aradus, Byblos, Sydon, Tyre. From these centres 
went out that boundless maritime enterprise which made the 
Phoenicians the trading people of the world. Very early — in 
pre-historic ages — the Phoenicians had possessed themselves 
of Cyprus. From that point to the Grecian coast of Asia 
Minor, or to the coasts and islands on either side of the 
^Egean, was an easy transition; then on to the Mediterranean, 
to Sicily and Italy, but more especially to the island of 
Sardinia ; or again to Egypt and the farther coasts of Africa 
on to Spain, and finally, through the Pillars of Heracles, to 
the far-off ' tin islands ' of the west, which were, it is likely 
enough, the British Isles. This is, in brief, the picture of 
1 Or Khita. 



316 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

the doings of the Phoenicians long before the days of 
history had begun to dawn upon the Aryan nations of the 
Mediterranean. 

If we desire to get any idea of the process by which the 
separation of the Aryan peoples became completed, we must 
put quite upon one side the idea of a nation as we see it 
now. Now, when we speak the word, we think of a political 
unit subject to one government, stationary, and confined 
within pretty exact limits of space. But very different were 
the nations during the process of their formation ; there was 
scarcely any political unity among them, their homes were 
unfixed, their members constantly shifting and changing com- 
binations, like those heaps of sand we see carried along in a 
cyclone. Let us, then, forget our political atlases, with their 
different colours and well-marked boundaries, and think not 
of the inanimate adjunct of a nation, the soil on which it 
happens to dwell, but of the nation as the men of whom it 
is made up. The earliest things we discern are those vortices 
set up in the midst of a homogeneous people, an attractive 
power somewhere in the midst of them which draws them 
into closer fellowship. It acts like the attractive power of a 
crystal in selecting from any of the surrounding matters the 
fragments most suited to its proper formation. Thus the 
earliest traditions of a people are generally the history of 
some individual tribe from which the whole nation feigns 
itself descended ; either because of its actual pre-eminence 
from the beginning, the power it had of drawing other tribes 
to share its fortunes, or because, out of many tribes drawn 
together by some common interest or sentiment, the bards 
of later days selected this one tribe from among the others, 
and adopted its traditions for their own. If we remember 
this, much that would otherwise appear a hopeless mass of 
contradiction and ambiguity is capable of receiving a definite 
meaning. 



THE GREEKS. 317 



The first rays of European history shine upon the island- 
dotted sea and bounding coasts of the ^Egean. Here sprang 
into life the Greek people, who have left behind 
so splendid a legacy of art and philosophy. 
These, as has been already said, made their entry into 
Europe traversing the southern shores of the Euxine, 
along which passed, still as one people, the ancestors of 
the Greeks and the Italians. The former, at all events, 
seem to have delayed long upon their route, and it was 
upon these shores, or perhaps rather in the tableland of 
ancient Phrygia, that first began the separation of two 
races who reunited to form the Greek nation. Some, the 
older race, the Pelasgi, made their way to the Hellespont, 
and by that route into European Greece ; the others, the 
Ionians as they subsequently became, passed onward to the 
sea-shore of Asia Minor, and, tempted no doubt by the 
facilities of the voyage, crossed from this mainland to 
the neighbouring islands, which lie so thickly scattered over 
the iEgean that the mariner passing from shore to shore of 
Asiatic and European Greece need never on his voyage lose 
sight of land. They did not, however, find these islands 
deserted, or occupied by savages only. The Phoenicians 
had been there beforehand, as they were beforehand upon 
almost every coast m Europe, and had made mercantile 
stations and established small colonies for the purposes of 
trading with the Pelasgi of Greece. The adventurous Ionians 
were thus brought early into contact with the advanced 
civilization of Asia, and from this source gained in all prob- 
ability a knowledge of navigation, letters, and some of the 
Semitic mythical legends. Thus while the mainland Greeks 
had altered little of the primitive culture, the germs of a 
Hellenic civilization, of a Hellenic life, were being fostered 
in the islands of the iEgean. We see this reflected in many 



318 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



Greek myths — in the legend, for example, of Minos and his 
early Cretan kingdom ; in the myth of Aphrodite springing 
from the sea by Cythera; and in the worship of Phoebus 
Apollo which sprang up in Delos. Legend spoke of two 
Minoses — one, the legislator of Crete, representative of all 
that was most ancient in national policy, and for that reason 
transferred to be the judge of souls in Hell; the second, he 
who made war against the Athenians, and compelled them 
to pay their dreadful yearly tribute of seven youths and 
seven maidens to be devoured of the Minotaur in the Cretan 
labyrinth. Until Theseus came. No doubt the two Minoses 
are but amplifications of one being, who, whether mythical or 
historical, is an echo in the memory of Greeks of the still 
older Cretan kingdom. In both tales Minos has a dreadful 
aspect ; perhaps because this ' Lord of the Isles ' had been 
inimical to the early growing communities of the mainland. 

The myths of Aphrodite and Apollo have been already 
commented upon as enfolding within them the history of 
their origin. Aphrodite is essentially an Asiatic divinity; 
she springs to life in a Phoenician colony. But Phoebus 
Apollo is before all things the god of the Ionian Greeks ; 
and as their first national life begins in the islands, his birth 
too takes place in one of these, the central one of all, Delos. 
In Homer, Delos, or Ortygia, is feigned to be the central 
spot of the earth. 

Thus the Greeks were from the beginning a commercial 
people. Before their history began, there is proof that they 
had established a colony in the Delta of the Nile ; and the 
frequent use of the word Javan x in the Bible — which here 
stands for Iontans — shows now tamiliar was their name to 

1 The word would be more correctly spelt Yazvdn. It is known that 
Tom has been changed from Ivon, or rather I won, by the elision of the 
digamma. 



THE GREEKS. 319 



the dwellers in Asia. Wherever these mariners came in 
contact with their brethren of the continexit, they excited in 
them the love of adventure, and planted the germs of a new 
life, so that it was under their paramount influence that these 
primitive Greeks began to coalesce from mutually hostile 
tribes into nations. In Northern Greece it was that the 
gathering together of tribes and cities first began. These 
confederations were always based primarily upon religious 
union, the protection of a common deity, a union to protect 
and support a common shrine. They were called Amphicty- 
onies, confederations of neighbours, a name which lived long 
in the history of Greece. These amphictyonies seem first 
to have arisen in the north. Here too the words Hellenic, 
Hellenes, first spring up as national epithets. Hellas never 
extended farther north than the north of Thessaly, and was 
naturally marked off from foreign countries by Olympia and 
Pierus. But the term spread southwards till it embraced 
all Greek-speaking lands to the extremity of the peninsula, 
and over the islands of the vEgean, and the coast of Asia 
Minor, on to the countless colonies which issued from 
Greek shores ; for Hellas was not a geographical term, it 
included all the peoples of true Hellenic speech, and dis- 
tinguished them from the barbaroi, the * babblers,' of other 
lands. 

The two great nations of the Graeco-Italic family kept up 
some knowledge of each other after they had forgotten the 
days of their common life, and, strange to say, in days 
before either of the two races had come to regard itself as a 
distinct people, each was so regarded by the other. The 
Italians classed the Greeks in the common name of Graeci 
or Graii, and the Greeks bestowed the name of 'Otukos upon 
the nation of the Italians. It is curious to reflect upon the 
different destinies which lay ahead of these two races, who 



320 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

came under such similar conditions into their new homes. 
Whether it were through some peculiarity in their national 
character, or a too-rapid civilization, or the two great influ- 
ences of a changeful character and adventurous life, the 
Greeks never cemented properly together the units of their 
race ; the Italians, through a much slower process of integra- 
tion, lived to weld their scattered fragments into the most 
powerful nation the world has ever seen. 

This second half, then, of the Grgeco-Italic family, crossing 
the Hellespont like (or with) the first dwellers in Greece 
proper, proceeded onwards until, skirting the 
' shores of the Adriatic, they found out a second 
peninsula, whose fertile plains tempted them to dispute 
the possession of the land with the older inhabitants. 
Who were these older inhabitants? In part they must 
have been those lake-dwellers of northern Italy to whom 
reference was made in our second chapter, and who were 
evidently closely alied to the stone-age men of Switzerland ; 
but besides these we have almost no trace of the men who 
were dispossessed by the Italic tribes, and these last, who 
pushed to the farthest extremity of the peninsula, must have 
completely absorbed, or completely exterminated, the abori- 
gines. The process by which the Italians spread over the 
land is altogether hidden from us. Doubtless their several 
seats were not assigned to the different branches at once, 
or without bloodshed. Though still no more than separate 
tribes, we are able to divide the primitive Italians into stocks 
of which the southern most resembled the ancient type of 
the Pelasgic family ; those in the centre formed the Latin 
group ; while north of these (assuming that they, too, were 
Aryans) lay the Etruscans, the most civilized of all the three. 
At this time the tribes seem to have acknowledged no 
common bond, nothing corresponding to the word Hellenic 



THE ROMANS. 321 



had sprung up to unite their interests : existence was as yet 
to the strongest only. And while the land was in this chaotic 
state, one tribe, or small confederacy of tribes, among the 
Latin people began to assert its pre-eminence. We see 
them dimly looming through a cloud of fable, daring, war- 
like, unscrupulous in their dealings with their neighbours, 
firm in their allegiance to each other. This tribe gradually 
increased in strength and proportions till, from being a mere 
band of robbers defending themselves within their rude 
fortifications, they grew in the traditions of their descend- 
ants, and of the other tribes whom in course of time they 
either subdued or absorbed, to be regarded as the founders 
of Rome. They did not accomplish their high destiny 
without trials and reverses. More powerful neighbouring 
kingdoms looked on askance during the days of their rise, 
and found opportunity more than once to overthrow their 
city and all but subdue their state. Their former brethren, 
the Celts, 1 who had been beforehand of all the Aryan races 
in entering Europe, and now formed the most powerful 
people in this quarter of the globe, several times swept 
down upon them like a devastating storm. But after each 
reverse the infant colony arose with renewed Antaean 
vigour. 

Thus in Italy, the development from the tribal to the 
national state was internal. No precocious maritime race 
awoke in many different centres the seeds of nationality ; 
rather this nationality was a gradual growth from one root, 
the slow response to a central attractive force. The energy 
of Rome did not go out in sea adventure, or in the coloniza- 
tion of distant lands ; but it was firmly bent to absorb the 
different people of her own peninsula, people of like blood 
with herself, but in every early stage of culture from an 
1 i.e. the Gauls. 

y 



322 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 



almost nomadic condition to one of considerable advance- 
ment in the arts of peace. 

When from the Greeks and Romans we turn to the Celts 
and Teutons, we must descend much lower in the records 
of history before we can get any clear glimpse at 
these. The Celts, who were probably the first 
Aryans in Europe, seem gradually to have been forced farther 
and farther west by the incursions of other peoples. At one 
time, however, we have evidence that they extended east- 
ward, at least as far as the Rhine, and over all that northern 
portion of Italy — now Lombardy and part of Sardinia — which 
to the Romans went by the name of Cisalpine Gaul. The 
long period of subjection to the Roman rule which Gaul ex- 
perienced, obliterated in that country all traces of its early 
Celtic manners, and we are reduced for our information 
concerning these to the pages of Roman historians, or to the 
remains of Celtic laws and customs preserved in the western 
homes of the race. The last have only lately received a 
proper attention. The most primitive Irish code — the Brehon 
laws — has been searched for traces of the primitive Celtic 
life. From both our sources we gather that the Celts were 
divided into tribes regarded as members of one family. 
These clans were ruled over by chiefs, whose offices were 
hereditary, or very early became so. They were thus but 
slightly advanced out of the most primitive conditions, — 
they cannot be described as a nation. Had they been so, 
extensive and warlike as they were, they would have been 
capable of subduing all the other infant nationalities of 
Aryan folk. As it was, as mere combinations of tribes 
under some powerful chieftain (Caesar describes just such), 
they gave trouble to the Roman armies even under a Caesar, 
and were in early days the most dreadful enemies of the 
Republic. Under Brennus, they besieged and took Rome, 



THE CELTS. 323 



sacked the city, and were only induced to retire on the pay- 
ment of a heavy ransom. A hundred years later, under 
another Brennus, they made their way into Thrace, ravaged 
the whole country, and from Nicomedes, King of Bithynia, 
obtained a settlement in Asia Minor in the district which 
from them received the name of Galatia. The occurrence 
of those two chiefs named Brennus shows us that this could 
hardly have been a mere personal name. It is undoubtedly 
the Celtic Brain, a king or chieftain, the same from which we 
get the mythic Bran, 1 and in all probability the Irish O'Brien. 
The recognition of the Celtic fighting capacity in the ancient 
world is illustrated by another circumstance, and this is more 
especially interesting to us of the modern world, whose army 
is so largely made up of Celts from Ireland and Scotland 
(Highlanders). Hieron I., the powerful tyrant of Syracuse, 
founded his despotism, as he afterwards confessed, chiefly 
upon his standing army of thirty thousand Gaulish merce- 
naries whom he kept always in his pay. 

For the rest, we know little of the internal Celtic life and 
of the extent of its culture. Probably this differed con- 
siderably in different parts, in Gaul for instance, and in 
Ireland. The slight notices of Gaulish religion which Caesar 
and Pliny give refer chiefly to its external belongings, to the 
hereditary sacerdotal class, who seem also to have been the 
bardic class ; of its myths and of their real significance we 
know little more than what can be gathered by analogy of 
other nations. We may assert that their nature-worship 
approached most nearly to the Teutonic form among those 
of all the Aryan peoples. 

Peculiarly interesting to us are such traces as can be 

1 For the story of Bran's head, which spoke after it was cut off, and 
which is in its natural interpretation probably the sun, see Mr. M. 
Arnold's Celtic Literature. 



324 THE DA WN OF HISTORY. 

gleaned of the Teutonic race. The first time we have seen 
that they show themselves upon the stage of history is pos- 
sibly in company with the Celts, supposing for a 
'moment that the Cimbri, who in company with 
the Teutones, the Tigurini, and the Ambrones were defeated 
by Marius (b.c. ioi), were Celts. 1 What branch of the 
German family (if any) the Teutones were, is quite un- 
certain. Again, in the pages of Caesar we meet with several 
names of tribes evidently of German origin. The Treviri, 
the Marcomanni (Mark men, men of the march or boundary), 
Allemanni (all-men, or men of the great or the mixed 2 
nation), the Suevi (Suabians), the Cherusci — men of the 
sword, perhaps the same as Saxons^ whose name has the 
same meaning. 

It is not till after the death of Theodosiusat the end of the 
fourth century of our era that the Germans fill a conspicuous 
place on the historical canvas. By this time they had come 
to be divided into a number of different nations, similar in 
most of the elements of their civilization and barbarism, 
closely allied in languages, but politically unconnected, or 
even opposed. Most of these Teutonic peoples grew into 
mighty nations and deeply influenced the future of Euro- 
pean history. It is therefore right that we pass them 
rapidly in review, i. The Goths had been long settled in the 
region of the Lower Danube, chiefly in the country called 
Moesia, where Ulfilas, a Gothic prince who had been con- 
verted to Christianity, returned to preach to his countrymen, 
became a bishop among them, and by his translation of the 
Bible into their tongue, the Moeso-Gothic, has left a per- 
petual memorial of the language. During the reign of 

1 Or if the Teutones were really Germans. Some have denied this 
(see Latham's Germania, Appendix). But, I think, without sufficient 
reason. 

2 Latham's Gemt-ania. 



THE TEUTONS. 325 

Honorius, the son of Theodosius, a portion of this nation, 
the West- or Visi-goths, quitted their home and undertook 
under Alaric (All-king) their march into Italy, thrice 
besieged and finally took Rome. Then turning aside, they 
founded a powerful kingdom in the south of Gaul and in 
Spain. A century later the East-Goths (Ostro-Goths), under 
the great Theodoric (People's-king) again invaded Italy 
and founded an Ostrogothic kingdom upon the ruins of the 
Western Empire. 2, 3, 4, 5. The Suevi, Alani, Burgun- 
dians, and Vandals crossed the Rhine in 405, and entered 
Roman territory, never again to return to whence they came. 
The Burgundians (City-men) fixed their abode in East-Central 
Gaul (Burgundy and Switzerland), where their kingdom lasted 
till it was subdued by the Franks ; but the other three 
passed on into Spain, and the Vandals (Wends 1 ) from Spain 
into Africa, where they founded a kingdom. 6. The Franks 
(Free-men), having been for nearly a century settled between 
the Meuse and the Scheldt, began under Clovis (Chlodvig, 
Hludwig, Lewis) (a.d. 480) their career of victory, from which 
they did not rest until the whole of Gaul owned the sway of 
Merovingian kings. 7. The Longobardi (Long-beards, or men 
of the long borde, long stretch of alluvial land), who after 
the Ostrogoths had been driven out of Italy by the Emperor 
of the East, founded in defiance of his power a second 
Teutonic kingdom in that country — a kingdom which lasted 
till the days of Charlemagne. 8. And last, but we may 
safely say not least, the Saxons (Sword- men, from seaxa, sl 
sword), who invaded Britain, and under the name of Angles 
(Engle) founded the nation to which we belong, the longest- 
lived of all those which rose upon the ruins of the Roman 
Empire. 

1 And therefore possibly Slaves, Wend being a name applied by 
Teutons to Slaves. 



326 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

The condition of the German people, even so late as the 
time when they began their invasion of the Roman territory, 
was far behind that of the majority of their Aryan fellows. 
It is likely that they were little more civilized than the 
Greeks and Romans were, in days when they lived together 
as one collection of tribes. For the moment when we catch 
sight of these — the Greeks and Romans — in their new 
homes, we see them settled agriculturists, with no trace left 
of their wandering habits. It was not so with the Teutons : 
they knew agriculture certainly, they had known it before 
they separated from the other peoples of the European 
family (for the Greek and Latin words for plough reappear 
in Teutonic speech x ) ; but they had not altogether bid 
adieu to their migratory life — we see them still flowing in 
a nebulous condition into the Roman lands. Even the 
Tartars of our day — the very picture of a nomadic people 
— practise some form of agriculture. They plant buck- 
wheat, which, growing up in a few months, allows them to 
reap the fruits of their industry without tying them long to 
a particular spot. The Teutons were more stationary than 
the Tartars, but doubtless they too were constantly shifting 
their homes — choosing fresh homesteads, as Tacitus says 
they did, wherever any spot, or grove, or stream attracted 
them. The condition of society called the village com- 
munity, which has been described in a former chapter, 
though long abandoned by the cultivated Greeks and 
Romans, was still suitable to the exigencies of their life ; but 
these exigencies imposed upon it some fresh conditions. 
Their situation, the situation of those who made their way 
into the western countries of Europe, was essentially that of 
conquerors ; for they must keep in subjection the original 
inhabitants, whether Romans or Celts ; and so all their social 
1 e.g. Old German, aran, to plough = arare, etc. 



THE TEUTONS, 327 



arrangements bent before the primary necessity of maintain- 
ing an effective war equipment. Age and wisdom were of 
less value to the community than youthful vigour. The 
patriarchal chief, chosen for his reputation for wisdom and 
swaying by his mature counsels the free assemblies of the 
states, gives place with them to the leader, famous for his 
valour and fortunes in the field, by virtue of which he exacts 
a more implicit obedience than would be accorded in un- 
warlike times, until by degrees his office becomes hereditary ; 
the partition of the conquered soil among the victors, and 
the holding of it upon conditions of military service, condi- 
tions which led so easily to the assertion of a principle of 
primogeniture, and thence, by slow but natural stages, to 
the conditions of tenure known as feudal; these are the 
marks of the early Teutonic society. 

Such germs of literary life as the Teutons possessed were 
enshrined in ballads, such as all nations possess in some 
form. The re-echoes of these have come down to us in the 
earliest known poems by men of Teutonic race, all of which 
are unfortunately of very recent date. All are distinguished 
by the principle of versifying which is essentially Teutonic ; 
the trusting of the cadence, not to an exact measurement of 
syllables or quantities, but to the pauses or beats of the 
voice in repetition, the effect of these beats being height- 
ened by the use of alliteration. Poems of this true Teu- 
tonic character, though many of them in their present shape 
are late in date, are the well-known old German lay of 
Hadubrand and TTildebrand, the old Scandinavian poems 
which we call Eddie poems, our old English poem Beowulf, 
and the Bard's Tale and the Fight of Finnesburg, and 
finally that long German poem called the Nibelungen, or 
say the poem out of which this long one has been made. 
These poems repeat old mythic legends, many of which 



328 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 

have for centuries been handed down from father to son, 
and display the mythology and religion of our German 
ancestors, such as in a former chapter we endeavoured to 
sketch them out. Slight as they are, they are of inestimable 
value, in that they help us to read the mind of heathen 
Germany, and to weigh the significance of the last great 
revolution in Europe's history — a revolution wherein we, 
through our ancestors, have taken and through ourselves are 
still taking part, and in which we have therefore so close an 
interest. 

But having carried the reader down to this point, our 
task comes to an end. Even for Europe, the youngest born 
as it were in the world's history, when we have passed the 
epoch of Teutonic invasion, the star of history sera rubens 
has definitely risen. Nations from this time forward emerge 
more and more into the light, and little or nothing falls to 
the part of pre-historic study. 



APPENDIX. 

NOTES AND AUTHORITIES. 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES. 

%* For the convenience of the reader, authorities are cited whenever 
it is possible in an English form, and if not in an English, in a French. 

CHAPTERS I. and II. 

Christy and Lartet, Reliquice Aquitanicce. 

Davis and Thurnam, Crania Britannica. 

Dawkins, Cave Hunting. 

Dawkins, Early Man in Britain. 

Evans, Stone Implements of Great Britain. 

Evans, Bronze Implements of Great Britain. 

Geikie, The Great Ice Age. 

Greenwell, British Barrows. 

Keller, The Lake-Dwellings of Switzerland i^xs. Lee). 

Lyell, Antiquity of Man. 

Lubbock, Prehistoric Times. 

Mortillet, Origine de la Navigation et de la Peche. 

Mortillet, Promenades Prehistoriques a V Exposition. 

Mortillet, Le Prehistorique EAntiquite de Phomme, 

Montelius, La Suede Prehistorique. 

Tylor, Anthropology. 

Tylor, Early History of Mankind. 

Tylor, Primitive Culture. 

Troyon, Habitations Lacustres. 

Worsaae, The Pre-history of the North (trs. Simpson). 

And numerous articles in the Archaeological and Anthropo- 
logical journals of England, France, and Germany. 

Pp. 8, and 14-15. Antiquity of Man. — The question con- 



332 APPENDIX. 



cerning the history of Palaeolithic man which presses the 
most immediately for solution, is that which has been just 
touched upon here : whether the variety of animal remains 
with which the remains of men are found associated, do really 
point to an immensely lengthened period of his existence, in 
this primitive state. We have said that human bones are 
found associated with those of the mammoth {Elephas primi- 
genius), those of the woolly rhinoceros, and with the remains 
of other animals whose existence seems to imply a cold-tem- 
perate, or almost frigid, climate ; at another place, or a little 
lower in the same river bed (the higher gravel beds are the 
oldest), we may find the bones of the hippopotamus, an animal 
which in these days is never found far away from the tropics. 
The conclusion seems obvious : man must have lived through 
the epoch of change — enormously long though it was — from 
a cold to an almost tropical climate. Some writers have freely 
accepted this view, and even gone beyond it to argue the possi- 
bility of man having lived through one of the great climatic 
revolutions which produced an Ice Age. (See the arguments 
on this head in Mr. Geikie's Ice Age.) And in a private letter, 
written from the West Indies, Kingsley says that he sees 
reason for thinking that man existed in the Miocene Era. (See 
Life of Kingsley.) 

On the other hand, these rather startling theories have not 
yet received their imprimatur from the highest scientific 
authorities. There are many ways in which they clash with 
the story which the stone-age remains seem to tell of man's 
primitive life. For instance, the civilization of the caves is to 
all appearance in advance of that of the drift-beds ; and yet, 
as we have seen (p. 18), the cave men must have existed 
during the earlier part of the stone age, that of the mammoth. 
Here we see evidences of a decided improvement, an advance ; 
whereas between the drift-remains associated with the mam- 
moth and those associated with the hippopotamus are seen few 
or none. 

P. 9. Cave-drawings or carvings. — The. best representations 
of these are to be found in the work of Christy and Lartet 
given above. 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES. 333 

P. 19. The ideas which savages or primitive men associate 
with drawings or representations of things (as also with the 
names of things) are sometimes exceedingly complex and diffi- 
cult of apprehension — for us. This the following example may 
show : — 

In the earliest Egyptian tombs the beautiful and realistic 
drawings have long attracted the attention of archaeologists, 
both on account of their intrinsic merit, and from the curious 
contrast which they present to the more conventional religious 
drawing and sculpture of a later date. Though the drawings 
of the first class are found exclusively upon the walls of tombs, 
they have apparently no connection either with ideas of death 
or with religious observances. They seem to represent merely 
the earthly and secular life of the entombed man : here he is 
superintending his labourers at their work, here he is hunting, 
here he is reclining at the banquet and watching the perform- 
ances of fools or dancing-girls. This is what a mere study of 
the drawings suggests. A more complete study of the inscrip- 
tions which accompany them have, however, convinced 
Egyptian archaeologists that the object of these wall-paintings 
is not merely decorative or representative, in the sense in which 
drawings are representative to us. Their essential use is what 
we may call magical. They are believed to contain (and this 
is a universal savage belief as touching drawings or sculptures of 
any kind) some elements of the things they represent. Thus 
the tomb-paintings would be a kind of doubles of the things 
which the deceased enjoyed in this life. And they would be 
placed in the tomb in order that the double of the deceased (what 
the Egyptians called his ka) might enjoy the usufruct of them 
in the new state. 

This is the simplest magic use of the copies or representation 
of things in early Egyptian tombs. But the idea of the makers 
of these drawings seems often to be more complicated than 
this. The drawings by being placed in the tombs are supposed 
to give the ka of the deceased {not in the tomb, but far away 
in the land of shades) the enjoyment of the doubles of the things 
which he enjoyed in life. In this instance the drawings are 
not the actual possessions which the dead man has, but they 
correspond to, or influence, or in a certain sense create in the 
land of shades new possessions, the doubles of the old. 



334 APPENDIX. 



These subtle and complex notions are by no means to be 
expressed by the conventional words magic, animism, etc., 
loosely thrown about by anthropologists. 

Pp. 47 and 52. Weaving. — The art of platting, which carries 
in it the germ of the art of weaving, is of immemorial, undis- 
coverable antiquity. There can hardly have been a time when 
men did not weave together twigs or reeds to form a rude tent 
covering — a primitive house. And one proof of the immense 
antiquity of this practice is given by the numerous names for 
twigs, reeds, etc., in different languages which are derived from 
words signifying to twist or weave. The word weave itself 
(Ger. weben) is connected with a Sanskrit root ve, meaning 
much the same thing ; and we find this same root ve appear- 
ing again in the Latin, vimen a twig, and vitis, a vine, the 
last so named from its tendrils, which we should judge were 
used for platting before they were used for producing grapes. 
From the same root, again, and for the same reason, are derived 
the Latin viburnum, briony ; the Slavonic wetle, willow ; the 
Sanskrit vetra, reed. The Latin scirpus, reed, and the Greek 
yp'«t>os, a net, are allied ; but these may not be instances quite in 
point. 

Such rude platting as this is a very different thing from the 
elaborately woven cloths found among the remains of the lake- 
villages, whose construction involves also the art of spinning. 

P. 54. The view put forward in this chapter concerning the 
race of the neolithic men in Europe, is that which seems to 
the writer most consistent with all the facts known, concerning 
the distribution of pre-historic man. As was said in the 
Preface, the students in different branches of pre-historic 
inquiry have not begun yet to collate sufficiently the results 
of their researches, and their opinions sometimes clash. We 
have to reconcile the pre-historic anthropologist and the 
ethnologist with the student of comparative philology. Most 
of the former are agreed that the earliest inhabitants of this 
quarter of the globe were most allied in character to the Lapps 
and Finns ; and were consequently of what we have distin- 
guished (Chapter V.) as the yellow-skinned family. But they arc 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES. 335 

far from agreed that the bronze-using men were not of the same 
race ; and some (Keller for instance) are violently opposed to 
the notion that the substitution of metal for stone was a sudden 
transition, and due to foreign importation. In some instances 
there is evidence that the change was gradual. 

But the evidence on the other side is stronger. The human 
remains found with the bronze weapons are generally clearly 
distinguishable (in formation of skull, etc.) from those associated 
with the implements of stone. The funeral rites of the bronze- 
age men were as a rule different from those of the stone-age 
men ; for while the former generally buried their dead, the 
latter seem generally to have burnt theirs (see Grimm, Ueber 
das Verbrennen der Leichen). Now we have strong reason for 
believing that the Aryan races (see Chapters IV., V.) practised 
this sort of interment ; and we have further reason for thinking 
that the use of metals was known to them before their entry 
into Europe (see Pictet, Les Origines Indo-Europeennes and 
Grimm, Geschichte der deut. Sprache). Moreover, these Aryans 
unless their original home were in Europe (see p. 99, note), must 
have come in at some time, and when they did come, they must 
have produced an entire revolution in the life of its inhabitants. 
No time seems so appropriate for their appearance as that which 
closes the age of stone. 

This theory does not preclude the possibility of, in many 
places, a side- by-side existence of stone users and bronze users, 
or even a gradual extension of the art of metallurgy ; and these 
conditions would be especially likely to arise in snch secluded 
spots as the lake-dwellings. Therefore, Dr. Keller's arguments 
are not impeached by the theory that the Aryans were the 
introducers of bronze into Europe. 

CHAPTERS III. and IV. 

Bopp, Comparative Grammar of the Sanskrit Zend, etc. (trs.). 

Breal, Principes de Philologie Comparee. 

Geiger, Contributions to the History of the Development of the 

Race (trs.). 
Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. 
Grimm, Ueber den Ur sprung der Sprache. 



336 APPENDIX. 






Kuhn, Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Sprachforschung. 

Miiller, Max, Lectures on the Science of Language. 

M uller, Max, Sanskrit Literature. 

Peile, Introduction to Greek a?id Latin Etymology. 

Pictet, Les Origines Indo-Europeennes. 

Sayce, Introductio7i to the Science of Language. 

Wilson, Introduction to the Rig Veda Sanhita. 

Agreeably to the plan enunciated in the first chapter (pp. 4-6) 
I have used up all the more generally admitted facts and 
theories to form what seemed to me a reasonable account of the 
growth of language ; to form an account too which should 
subserve one great end of this volume, by stimulating the 
thoughts of the reader at the same time that it pointed out the 
nature of the evidence upon which conclusions are founded, 
thereby preparing the reader to pursue the enquiry upon his 
own account. 

The science of Comparative Philology is, however, in too 
unripe a condition to allow us to speak with dogmatic assurance 
with regard to its inferences ; even those which seem fundamental 
have been, and may again, be called in question. It is right 
here, therefore, to remind the reader that it is quite upon the 
cards that further research may end by upsetting the generally 
accepted theory of the growth of inflexions in language. Even 
now there is a school of philologists and anthropologists that 
denies the premise upon which this theory rests — the radical 
origin of all language. This school maintains that, instead of 
speech beginning in monosyllabic root-sounds, as is generally 
supposed, it begins in extremely elaborate and complicated 
sounds which are in fact nothing else than sentences ; that it 
is only by the wear and tear of use that the sentence has got 
split up into its component sounds, which have then taken the 
character of monosyllabic roots. 

This theory was first set on foot by a writer (Waitz) who is 
an anthropologist rather than a student of language, and it 
might be distinguished as the anthropological theory of the 
origin of speech. We have no space here for a full discussion 
of its merits. It will be enough to indicate some d priori 
arguments in its favour. 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES. 357 



1. It would make the language of primitive man analogous 
to a state of things which many people think they have dis- 
covered as typical of the most primitive savages — namely, a 
state of society which, in its customs, marriage laws, etc., differs 
from modern society in being not more simple, but infinitely 
more complex. 

2. This supposed original expressive sentence and its sub- 
sequent analysis would have considerable analogy to what we 
ourselves have just seen is the history of writing, which begins 
with a more or less elaborate picture ; then the parts of the 
picture are split up, and by the wear and tear of frequent use 
these parts are added together in separate items to form 
picture-wrzYzVz^", which is quite a different thing from picturing, 
and which is the immediate parent of writing as we know it. 
An analogy of this kind cannot be without weight. 

On the other hand, it must be pointed out that the strongest 
arguments in favour of this view are the d priori arguments. 
True, we do not know enough of the languages of the world to 
speak with dogmatic assurance. But the history of all the 
languages which have been closely studied points away from 
the anthropological theory. 

Again, the first argument in favour of Waitz's theory is itself 
clearly founded upon a paradox. It can scarcely be seriously 
maintained that while we can trace the growth of implements, 
such as spears and knives, from the simplest possible form 
upwards, such implements as speech and social laws have 
been ready made in a highly complex form. Argument number 
two serves to expose the grossness of this paradox. It would 
be as reasonable to maintain that mankind had begun by 
drawing pictures before they learnt to draw the elements out 
of which the pictures were composed. 

The whole theory, therefore, belongs to the category of 
theories which explain obscurum per obscurius. It may be, and 
no doubt is, practically impossible to explain in any natural way 
how speech arose. But at all events it is easier to understand 
how it may have arisen in a simple form and grown to one 
more complex, than to imagine it beginning in a complex state 
and by detrition resolving into simple elements. 



338 APPENDIX. 

P. 68. Consonantal and vowel sounds. — The fact that even in 
Aryan roots the consonants have more weight than the vowel 
sounds will be evident merely from the instances given in the 
course of this and the following chapter^?)/, flee, flew (w is 
here a vowel sound) ; night, Nachtj knight, Knechtj Raum, room; 
asmi, esmi (eimi), sum, etc. This general rule holds good for 
almost all languages, and seems necessarily to do so from the 
stronger character of the consonantal and the weaker character 
of the vowel sounds. 

But the relative importance of vowels and consonants is very 
different in different classes of language. In the Aryan tongues 
the essential root is made up of vowels and consonants, and the 
variations upon the root idea are generally expressed by addi- 
tions to the root and not by internal changes in it. In this way, 
as we saw, most grammatical inflexions are made : hom-o, hom- 
inis, am-o, am-abam, tvtttco, Ztvittov, Ztv^ov, etc. But in Semitic 
languages the root consists of the consonants only, and the 
inflexions are produced by internal changes, changes of the 
vowels which belong to a consonant. For example, in Arabic 
the three consonants k-t-l (katl) represent the abstract notion of 
the act of killing. From them we get kdtil, one who kills ; kitl 
(pi. aktal), an enemy ; katala, he slew ; kutila, he was slain. 
From z-r-b (zarb), the act of striking ; zarbwi, a striking (in 
concrete sense) ; zardbun, a. striker ; zaraba, he struck ; zuriba, 
he was struck. Compare these with occido, occidi, occisor, or 
with rvirra, r4rv(pa, etc., and we see that in the Aryan tongues 
the radical remains almost unchanged, and the inflexions are 
made ab extra; but in the Semitic language the inflexions are 
made by changes of vowel sound within the framework of the 
root consonants. 

The usual grammatical root in Arabic is composed of three 
consonants, as in the examples given above. Most of the 
Semitic languages are in too fully formed a state to allow us to 
see whether or no these roots, which are of course at the least 
dissyllabic, grew up out of single sounds ; but a comparison 
with some languages of the Semitic family {e.g. Egyptian) which 
are still near to their early radical state, show us that they have 
probably done so. 

The Coptic language, which is the nearest we can get to the 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES. 339 

tongue of the ancient Egptians, is extremely interesting in that 
it displays the processes of grammar formation, as has just been 
said, in a more intelligible shape than we find in the higher 
Semitic tongues. 

P. 98. We are here speaking, be it remembered, of families 
of language. The ethnology of a people is not necessarily the 
same as its language ; so that when we speak of a family of 
language including the tongues of a certain number of races, 
we do not imply that they were wholly of the same ethnic 
family. This caution is especially necessary as regards the 
earliest great pre-historic nations who seem to have been what 
are called Cushites — anything but pure Semites (see Chapter V.) 
— but whose languages may properly be ranged in the Se- 
mitic family. The Egyptian, for instance, was more nearly 
monosyllabic than any other Semitic tongue (Chapter XIII.) ; 
yet such inflexions as it has show an evident relationship with 
Hebrew and other Semitic languages (see Appendix to Bunsen's 
Egypt's Place in Universal History). 



CHAPTER V. 

Brugsch, Recueils de Monuments Egyptiens. 

Brugsch, Histoire d Egypt. 

Brugsch, Materiaux pour servir, etc. 

Bunsen, Egypfs Place, etc. (ed. Dr. Birch). 

Ebers, Egyptian History. 

Flower, W. H., Races of Men. 

Legge, Chinese Classics, with Introduction, etc. 

Lenormant, Manual of the Ancient History of the East (trs.)„ 

Lepsius, Chronologie der Egypten. 

Mariette Pasha, Abrege de P Histoire dEgypte. 

Maspero, Histoire Ancienne des Peuples de V Orient. 

Maury, Le Livre et I Homme. 

Rawlinson, Herodotus, with Notes. 

Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, etc. 

Rouge (Vte. de), Examen de VOuvrage de M. Bunsen, 



34o APPENDIX. 



Sayce, Ancient Empires of the East. 
Tylor, Anthropology. 

P. 119. The word Turanian is untenable as an ethnic term. 
It can be used — though with a somewhat loose signification 
— to distinguish those languages which are in the agglutina- 
tive stage. But the reader must be careful not to suppose that 
it comprises a ciass of nearly allied peoples, as the Aryan 
and Semitic families of language, upon the whole, do. The 
only race which includes the Turanian peoples of Europe and 
Asia includes also those who speak monosyllabic languages : 
this is the yellow race, and is of course a division of the widest 
possible kind. 

P. 122. Touching the relationship of the Egyptians to the 
negroes a variety of opinions are held. There can be no question 
that their types of face forbid us to doubt that there was some 
relationship between them ; while the representations of negroes 
upon the ancient monuments of Egypt show that from the 
remotest historical period there was a marked distinction 
between the peoples, and that from that early time till now the 
negroes have not changed in the smallest particular of ethnical 
character. On the other hand, many people consider the Egyp- 
tians and the Accadians to have been essentially the same 
people, the Cushites — or as some call them Hamites — a race 
which perhaps anciently spread from Susiana across Arabia 
and the Red Sea to Abyssinia and Egypt. 

P. 123. The names Chaldaan and Assyrian are used with a 
variety of significations by Orientalists, and in a way likely to 
be confusing to the general reader. He will do well, therefore, 
to bear the following facts in mind : — 

1. The Tigris and the Euphrates, after both taking their rise 
in the Caleshin Dagh mountain in the Armenian highlands, 
soon separate by a wide sweep, the Euphrates flowing south- 
west and towards the Mediterranean, the Tigris flowing south- 
east towards the Persian Gulf. But instead of flowing into 
the Mediterranean, the Euphrates again turns first due south, 
then south-east, so that it thenceforward flows parallel with 
the Tigris. They approach nearer and nearer, until about Bag- 
dad they are separated by some twenty miles only ; but here 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES, 341 

they once more begin to increase the distance between them, 
and do not again approach until just before they unite to fall 
into the Persian Gulf. In ancient days they never united, as 
the Persian Gulf spread more than a hundred miles farther 
inland than it does to-day. 

The territory enclosed between these two great streams, 
with the addition of some territory to the east of the Tigris 
and west of the Euphrates, is that which the Greeks called 
Mesopotamia. Lower Mesopotamia begins about the point 
where the streams approach the nearest, and this Lower Meso- 
potamia is the territory distinguished by the name Chaldcea. 

Territorially this Chaldaea was in ancient days divided into 
two districts — Shumir in the south, and Accad in the north. 

The earliest known inhabitants of these districts were a 
Turanian race, who from their territorial possessions should 
properly be called the Shumir-Accadians or Shumiro-Accadians. 
But it is common to call them simply Accadians (or Accad), and 
their language, an agglutinative or Turanian one, Accadian 
likewise. 

Here therefore is the first element of confusion — between the 
smaller territorial division, Accadia, and the larger ethnic divi- 
sion, which includes all the primitive inhabitants of Chaldaea. 

2. But there mingled with these primitive Accadians a Semitic 
race, and gradually transformed them, so that the speech of the 
country changed from being a Turanian or agglutinative, to 
being a Semitic and inflected language. 

Now, these Semitic people are probably the Chaldaeans of the 
Bible ; at any rate the Bible seems to take no account of the 
primitive Turanian stock. Its Chaldaeans are a people allied 
by nationality to the Shemites, though perhaps so far mixed 
with an earlier stock as to be what we may call proto-Semitic. 

Here is the second element of confusion, a confusion between 
the unchanged land of Chaldaea and the two races who in suc- 
cession inhabited it. 

3. Finally, the language of the Semitic (or proto-Semitic) 
Chaldaeans was practically the same as that of the people who 
rose into a nation in Upper Mesopotamia, viz. the Assyrians. 
The Assyrians, as is said in Chapter V., founded an empire 
which overthrew the ancient Chaldaean or Babylonian empire* 



342 APPENDIX. 



— for from its largest town the empire is also called the Baby- 
lonian — and was in its turn overthrown by an alliance between 
the revolted Babylon and the King of Media. 

The third element of confusion then arises from applying to 
the language of the Semitic Chaldaeans the name Assyrian, 
which involves no participation in the empire of the Assyrians. 

It is probable that these elements of confusion have not 
always been avoided in the preceding chapters. But with the 
aid of this note they will no longer present difficulties to the 
reader. 

It will be seen that both the Egyptians and Chaldaeans of 
Genesis, chap, x., are a Semitic people so far as regards the 
character of their language, and belong in the main to the 
white race. So far as regards their ethnic character, they were 
probably more mixed than the peoples (Hebrews, Assyrians 
proper, etc.) who are called the children of Shena, and therefore 
we may call them proto- Semitic. 

The term Hamitic is altogether misleading, and had better 
be unused in ethnical classifications. The real meaning, if we 
follow the intention of its use in the Bible, is to distinguish 
from the purer Semites (Hebrews, Moabites, etc.) what we 
may call the proto-Semites ; that is, a number of races, such 
as the Egyptians and Chaldaeans, as well as the Canaanites 
generally, who spoke Semitic languages, but were very prob- 
ably of impure blood, very likely of Semitic and Turanian 
intermixture. If the word Hamitic be used to include the rest 
of the inhabitants of the world who were not Semitic or Aryan, 
then, though it will not be very useful, no objection can be 
taken to its employment. But in that case we shall be obliged, 
forming our classification by the known rather than by the 
unknown, to include the Canaanites (who spoke Semitic lan- 
guages) in the Semitic family ; and this will be in direct contra- 
diction to the use of Hamitic in the Bible narrative. 



CHAPTERS VI. and VII. 

Coulanges, La Cite Antique. 

Grimm, Deutsche Rechts-Alterthiimer. 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES. 343 

Lavalaye, La Propriete et ses Formes Primitives. 
Maine, Ancient Law. 
Maine, Village Communities. 
Maine, Early Institutions. 
Maurer, Geschichte der Dorf- Verfassung. 
Nasse, Agricultural Communities of the Middle Ages (trans- 
lated by Ouvry). 
Pictet, Les Origines Indo-Europeennes. 

In the account here given of the two most important social 
forms, the patriarchal family and the village community, the 
endeavour has been rather to present such a picture of them 
as may exhibit their chief peculiarities in a sufficiently clear 
and striking manner, than to enter into a minute examination 
of the various remains from which the picture has been 
constructed. It must not be supposed, however, that the 
representations here given can be completely verified from 
existing information. They are rather to be looked upon as 
typical of what these forms may have been in their earliest 
stage and under favourable circumstances. We only meet 
with traces of them when undergoing decay. Although the 
writer fully recognizes the importance of the researches of 
McLellan and others concerning the earlier conditions 
of society, no attempt has been made to give an account 
of the results which have been arrived at in this field of 
inquiry. Two reasons may be assigned for this omission. 
Firstly, the intrinsic difficulties of treating the subject in 
a manner suitable to the ' general reader ' are, it is conceived, 
a sufficient excuse for the omission. Secondly, the results at 
present attained are so vague that the mere statement of 
them would be valueless without entering into great detail. 
All that can as yet fairly be regarded as established is 
either that the Aryan and Semitic races have at one time 
possessed social customs and practices similar to those which 
are found in the most barbarous people ; or that they have 
during some period of their history so far amalgamated with, or 
been influenced by, other races that had just emerged from this 
state*, as to absorb into their traditions and customs traces of 
a social condition of a much lower and more primitive kind 



344 



APPENDIX. 



than that in which we first find them. If we try to form any 
conception of what the earlier state may have been, we at 
once see that the results at present attained are almost purely 
negative. All that can be predicated is that at one time a 
large proportion of the human race did not possess the notions 
of the family and the marriage tie which were entertained 
by people in the patriarchal state ; that they did not trace 
blood relationship in the same way. What particular 
customs immediately preceded or led to the patriarchal family, 
whether this latter is to be considered as the original social 
type, and the lower forms are to be regarded as derived from 
it, or vice versa — to these questions no satisfactory answer can 
at present be given. 

Each step indeed in social change is to be looked upon, to a 
great extent, as simply a phenomenon to be noted, the causes 
for which it is impossible to determine accurately. This is 
especially the case with the village community. The extent 
of its distribution would incline one to the belief that it is a 
natural or necessary result of a certain stage of social develop- 
ment ; while the elaborate and artificial nature of its con- 
struction points to the probability of some common origin from 
which its developments might be traced. The greatest difficulty, 
however, lies in trying to assign to this institution its due 
effect on civilization : for it is frequently found in close com- 
bination with institutions to which its spirit seems most strongly 
opposed. Thus while we find it flourishing among the Germanic 
tribes, we also discover among them a tendency to the custom 
of primogeniture much more marked than is discoverable 
among other Aryan races. Yet this custom scarcely seems to 
find a place in the pure village community beyond the limits 
of each individual household. At the same time the patri- 
archal power was certainly less among the Germans than 
among the early Romans, and probably also less than among 
the Slavs. 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES, 345 



CHAPTERS VIII.— XL 

Bournouf, Commentaire sur le Yacna. 

Bugge, Scemtmdar Edda. 

Bunsen, God in History (trs.). 

Bunsen, Egypfs Place, etc. 

Busching, Nibelungen Lied. 

Cox, Mythology of the Aryan Nations. 

Edda den asldra ok Snorra. 

Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie. 

Grimm, Ueber das Verbr. der Leichen. 

Grimm, Heldenbuch. 

Keary, Outlines of Primitive Belief. 

Kuhn, Herabkunft des Feuers. 

Kuhn, Sagen, Gebrduche u. Mdhrchen. 

Kuhn, in Zeitschf. v. Sp. and Z.f. dent. Alt. 

Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion. 

Lepsius, Todtenbuch. 

Maspero, Histoire Ancienne, etc. 

Miiller, Op. cit. 

Miiller, Lectures on the Science of Religion. 

Miiller, Chips fro7n a German Workshop. 

Miiller, Origin and Growth of Religion (Hibbert Lectures). 

Miiller, Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv. Zend Avesta (Dar- 

mesteter). 
Preller, Griechische Mythologie. 
Ralston, Songs of the Russian People. 
Ralston, Russian Folk-tales. 
Rawlinson, Op. cit. 

Rouge' (Vte. de), Etudes sur le Rituel des Egypt. 
Sayce, Religion of the Ancient Babylonians. 
Simrock, Handbuch der. d. Myth. 
Tiele, Outlines of the History of Religion (trs.). 
Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale. 
Welcker, Griechische Gbtterlehre. 
Wuttke, Deutsche Volksaberglaube. 



yL6 APPENDIX. 



The origin and history of religion and mythology is (as we 
might expect) a matter of keen controversy ; and I cannot 
anticipate that the reader would rise from the perusal of all the 
books given in the above list with his mind not confused upon 
many points on which they touch. To explain the position 
taken up in Chapters VIII.-XL, I will add the following notes, 
which may help the reader over some difficult and disputed 
questions. 

i. In the first place, we have confined our attention altogether 
to the essential framework of the religious system or the myth- 
system with which we were concerned. The irrational element 
is omitted, and the mere process of omitting this relieves us 
from entering upon many points which are strongly controverted 
at this moment. For instance, the work of Mr. A. Lang cited 
above (and which I specially mention here, as it is a good deal 
upon the tapis at the present moment) is altogether occupied in 
combating a certain theory of Mr. Max Miiller's, that the 
irrational element in Aryan mythologies (Greek and Sanskrit 
especially) could be shown to have arisen in most instances 
from an abitse of language, or, more exactly, from an oblivion of 
the true meaning of some essential word or name contained in 
the myth, whereby a wholly mistaken and wholly irrational 
element has been incorporated into the history of the god or 
hero. 

This theory Mr. A. Lang combats by adducing the evidence 
that these irrational parts in mythology may be survivals of 
thought from an earlier age in the history of the people, when 
what seemed irrational (and often disgusting) to their literary 
successors, and seems irrational and disgusting to us, seemed 
neither one nor the other. 

Into this controversy we are not required to enter. But it is 
important to point out to the reader how completely this lies 
outside the sphere of study which we have chosen ; the more so 
because, through some criticisms of Mr. Lang's book, a notion 
has gained currency (among those presumably who have not 
read the book in question) that Mr. Lang has revolutionized the 
whole study of religion and mythology, whereas he only proposes 
to deal with one section, and that a small one, of it. 

Nor can it fairly be said that we are bound in these chapters 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES. 347 

to pay much attention to the irrational element in belief. If we 
were writing a complete treatise upon flint implements, we 
should be bound to include not only those flints which had 
been clearly chipped with a definite design, and which followed 
well-established forms, but with pieces of abnormal shape, and 
even with flakes and cores, the detritus, so to say, which had 
been left aside when the more available flints had been chosen. 
If, again, we were dealing completely with the history of village 
communities or systems of land tenure, we should be bound in 
like fashion to treat of abnormal as well as normal forms. But 
obviously that is not what is expected in the chapters of this 
book. We only profess to treat of early civilization under its 
more usual aspects and in its completest form. So with early 
beliefs ; we only profess to concern ourselves with what is 
rational and normal in the creeds with which we are dealing. 

There are always certain drawbacks, certain new liabilities to 
error, which follow the step of each fresh advance in science. 
The shadow of this kind which attends the comparative method 
which had been adopted with such splendid results, not only 
in many natural sciences, but in almost all branches of pre- 
historic study — the comparative study of laws, institutions, 
language, myths, and creeds — is a tendency to confound the 
condition of these things with which we are actually concerned 
with their condition at some previous time. As Mr. Tylor 
admirably says about language, that, interesting as it is to trace 
the history of words, our understanding of their actual meaning 
is not always facilitated by a misty sense that at some previous 
time they meant something else, so we may say of many other 
things— laws, for example, and customs, or, still more, myths and 
religions. 

It will be obvious, for instance, that our appreciation of the 
place in history of certain personages will be very little affected 
by tracing some of the stories told about them to quite different 
countries and periods in the history of the world. Suppose (for 
example) that we should find in New Zealand legends a story 
closely analogous to the story of Harold's oath to William the 
Bastard. It would be by no means safe to affirm that, if we 
sifted the multitudinous legends of the world, we should not be 
able to find some pretty close analogy to William's celebrated 



348 APPENDIX. 



trick of concealing the venerated relics beneath the altar. How, 
it may be asked, would such a discovery affect our estimate 
of the parts which William and Harold played as the rival 
claimants for the English throne? If the reader can answer 
that question he can decide the influence which studies into the 
religion of the Maoris or Andaman Islanders are likely to have 
over his estimate of the rational parts of an historic creed. 
Such a discovery as we have imagined would suggest the pos- 
sibility that some remote channel of tradition had fathered an 
old myth upon Harold and William. But it would give us no 
clue as to how well it fitted upon their characters, how far it 
gained general currency at the time. Upon these questions 
alone depends our estimate of the position which the two his- 
toric personages occupied in the world of their day. For a 
story which is generally believed is almost the same as a story 
which is true. 

Or, if the reader prefers a story which is really a myth, take 
the history of Hasting at the siege of Luna, with which most 
readers will be acquainted, and how he gained an entry into 
the town by feigning death and obtaining that his body should 
be carried within the walls for Christian burial. That is un- 
doubtedly a myth ; it is found to be sporadic among the his- 
tories of the Vikings and of the Normans, their descendants. 
Should we discover that a very similar story has been current 
among the Incas of Peru, how far could that discovery affect our 
estimate of the supposed character of Hasting? 

When the reader has made up his mind upon this subject 
he will be in a position, we have said, to estimate the weight 
which we ought to attach to discoveries of this kind in refer- 
ence to historic creeds ; because the heroes of these creeds are 
evidently in the position of historic personages for those who 
hold the belief. As long as the Norsemen think that they hear 
Odin rushing along at night upon his horse Sleipnir, Odin is 
for them an historic personage ; as long as Greeks think that 
it is Zeus who is 'thundering from Ida,' Zeus is as real to 
them as William the Bastard was to the English nation — more 
real than Hasting was to Dudo. And I maintain that an 
understanding of what the Greeks thought about Zeus, or the 
Norsemen about Odin, is very little furthered by (in Mr. Tylor's 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES. 349 

words) a vague notion that at some other time they thought 
something quite different. 

We may, however, legitimately go a little way behind the 
date of our documents. Our comprehension of the feudal 
system of land tenure is not much assisted by comparing it 
with systems in use among the Zulus ; but it is useful to 
study the land tenure prevalent among the German nationali- 
ties before the feudal system properly so called was introduced. 
In the same way, behind the actual religious ideas shadowed 
forth in the Vedic hymns, in Homer, or in the Eddaic poems, 
we may, I maintain, legitimately go back to a time when the 
divine beings of these creeds were more nearly identified with 
natural phenomena out of which they sprang. It is just this 
condition of the Aryan creeds which I have sought to portray 
in the chapters devoted to the subject. In the actual docu- 
ments before us the gods of Greece or Scandinavia do not 
take the guise of the heaven, or the sun, or the wind. But 
enough remains in their natures to show that it was out of these 
phenomena that they emerged to become the independent 
personalities which we know. This is what is meant by the 
nature or origins of Indra, Zeus, Odin, etc., as the expressions 
are used above. 

P. 195. I take the liberty of transcribing a passage from Mr. 
Max Miiller's Lectures on the Science of Religion. 

1 One of the oldest names of the deity, among the Semitic 
nations, was El. It meant strong. It occurs in the Babylonian 
inscriptures as Ilu, God, and in the very name of Bab-il, the 
gate or temple of II. In Hebrew, it occurs both in its general 
sense, as strong, or hero, and as a name of God. We have it in 
Beth-el^ the House of God, and in many other names. If used 
with the article as ha-El, the Strong One, or the God, it always 
is meant in the Old Testament for Jehovah, the true God. El, 
however, always retained its appellative power, and we find it 
applied therefore, in parts of the Old Testament, to the God of 
the Gentiles also. 

' The same El was worshipped at Byblus, by the Phoenicians, 
and he was called there the Son of Heaven and Earth. His 
father was the son of Eliun, the most high god, who had been 



356 APPENDIX. 



killed by wild animals. The son of Eliun who succeeded him 
was dethroned, and at last slain by his own son El, whom Philo 
identifies with the Greek Kronos, and represents as the presiding 
deity of the planet Saturn. In the Himyaritic inscriptions too 
the name of El has been discovered. 

' With the name of El, Philo connected the name of Elohim, 
the plural of Eloah. In the battle between El and his father, 
the allies of El, he says, were called Eloeim, as those who were 
with Kronos were called Kronioi. This is no doubt a very 
tempting- etymology of Eloah; but as the best Semitic scholars, 
and particularly Professor Fleischer, have declared against it, 
we shall have, however reluctantly, to surrender it. 

' Eloah is the same word as the Arabic Ilah, God. In the 
singular, Eloah is used synonymously with El ; in the plural, it 
may mean gods in general, or false gods : but it becomes in the 
Old Testament the recognized name for the true God, plural in 
form but singular in meaning. In Arabic Ilah without the 
article means a god in general ; with the article Al-Ilah, or 
Allah, becomes the name of the God of Abraham and Moses.' 

P. 197. Nature-Worship. — The part which the phenomena 
of nature play in training the thoughts of uncultivated men 
toward religion, and poetry, and hero-worship, and legendary 
lore, has been made the subject of warm controversy. And it 
may not be altogether amiss if we bestow a little thought upon 
the question, and upon the character of evidence by which this 
nature-worship is thought to be established. 

That it is in no sense a degradation of our estimate of man 
to suppose that his thoughts were led upward from the con- 
templation of the objects of sense which lay around to the 
contemplation of a Higher Being beyond the region of sensible 
things, will become, it is to be hoped, clear upon a little reflec- 
tion, and upon a candid examination of what has been said in 
PP- I 73~ I 76. But still it may fairly be asked, Did this process 
of deifying the powers of nature take place ? Why should not the 
human mind have come independently by the direct revelation 
of God's voice speaking in the hearts of men to a notion of a 
God ruler of the world, and then, by a natural process of decay, 
proceed thence to a polytheism, a pantheon of beings who were 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES. 351 

supposed to rule over the different phenomena of nature, just as 
the different members of a cabinet hold sway over the various 
branches of national government ? 

This was, until comparatively recent years, the received 
opinion concerning mythology, and it is one which tacitly keeps 
its place in the writings of many scholars, especially of those 
who have been brought up almost exclusively upon the study of 
classical languages and classical religions : for it is only after a 
wide study, and a comparison of many different religions in many 
different stages, that the conviction of the opposite truth forces 
itself upon one. It is obvious that for the purpose of a scientific 
knowledge of the formation of religious systems, we must not 
observe them in their fullest development, but rather turn to 
such of their brother-religions as have remained in a more 
stunted condition. Nor, again, should we deal, except very 
cautiously, with an extremely imaginative people, like the Greeks ; 
for with them changes from any primitive form will be much 
more rapid and more complete than the changes in some more 
meagre systems. The fragmentary Teutonic myths, and the 
relics of these in mediaeval superstition, are for this purpose 
sometimes more trustworthy than those of Greece ; and partly 
on this account, partly because they are less familiar to the 
reader, we have drawn largely upon them for illustration in 
our chapters upon Aryan religion and Folk-tales. 

The most useful of all, however, is the religion of the Vedas, 
in so far as the Vedas give us an insight into the earliest faith 
of the people of India. Here we may often detect the etymo- 
logy of a name which would be inexplicable if we only knew it 
in Greek or Latin and Norse. We have seen how this is the 
case in repect of the word Dyaus ; and how the etymology of 
this word clearly shows, what from themselves we should never 
discover, thkt Zeus and Jupiter and Tyr are names which had 
originally the s^me meaning as a natural phenomenon. We say 
originally, because the Sanskrit is found by numberless ex- 
amples (whereof we gave one, duhitar) to show an origin for 
many words whose origin is lost in other Aryan languages, and 
therefore to stand nearest to the primitive tongue of the Aryans. 
In this lies the whole force of the argument. If the old Aryans 
once used the same word for ' heaven ' and for * god,' it is im- 



352 APPENDIX. 



possible to believe that they had the power of separating at will 
the two ideas which we receive from these two words : for an 
examination of formal logic shows us that notions do not 
become completely distinguishable until they receive individual 
names. The inference is obvious that a considerable number, 
at any rate, of the gods of our Aryan ancestors were nature-gods 
in the strictest sense. 

It is equally true, however, that such divinities tend to fall into 
certain forms, and accommodate themselves to ideals which, or 
the germs of which, we may believe pre-existed in the human 
mind. It is thus that we have noticed the sun-gods and the 
heaven-gods fulfilling their separate functions, and answering to 
certain denned needs in the human heart. 

P. 230. Persephone and Balder. — The true tragedy of the 
death of summer is in the Norse religion portrayed in the myth 
of Balder, the sun-god, which in respect of its force and inten- 
tion fully answers to the Persephone myth. It has often been a 
subject of surprise that Balder's-bale, Balder's death, was not 
celebrated at a time of year appropriate to mourning for the loss 
of the sun-god, but at the summer solstice, when Balder attains 
his fullest might and brightest splendour. Why choose such a 
day as that to think of his mournful bedimming in the wintry 
months ? It seems to show a strange, gloomy, and forecasting 
nature on the part of our Norse ancestors to be always reflecting 
that in the midst of life — in the midst of our brightest, fullest 
life — we are in death. 

I imagine that the custom of celebrating Balder's-bale in this 
way arose not entirely from the desire to preach this melan- 
choly sermon ; though in part no doubt this desire was the 
cause of it. It arose also from a dramatic instinct inducing 
men for the sake of a strong contrast to surround the sun-god 
with all the images of summer at the time when they were think- 
ing of his death. It gives a dramatic intensity to the moment; 
and thus it corresponds exactly with the picture of Persephone* 
playing in the meadows in spring-time surrounded by all the 
attributes of spring, just as Hades rises from the earth to bear 
her for ever from the light of day. 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES. 353 

P. 241. Thanatos. — Thanatos and Hypnos belong to the 
region of allegory rather than pure mythology. For in pure 
mythology the place of the first is taken by Hades. In Vedic 
mythology their part is played by the two Saramayas ; one 
probably chiefly a divinity of Death, the other of Sleep, and the 
two being brothers, as of course Death and Sleep are. 

It has been suggested that among a group of figures sculp- 
tured upon the drum of a column brought from the Artemesium 
(Temple of Diana) at Ephesus, one is a representation of 
Thanatos, Death. The figure is that of a boy, as young and 
comely as Love, but of a somewhat passive expression, and 
with a sword girt upon his thigh, which Eros never wears. 
His right hand is raised as though he were beckoning : and 
with him stand Demeter and Hermes, both divinities connected 
with the rites of the dead. Save in this instance — if it be an 
instance — Thanatos is unknown to early Greek art. Hypnos 
when he appears wears a fair womanish face with closed eyes, 
scarcely distinguishable from the artistic representation of the 
Gorgon. As the moon, this last is in some sense a being of 
sleep and death. 

P. 255. Myths and the rules of their interpretation have 
been made of late years the subject of controversy almost as 
keen as that which has raged round that primary question 
concerning the existence of nature-worship which we have dis- 
cussed above. In this (XI.) and the previous chapters the 
writers have endeavoured to keep before the reader only those 
features in a myth which are essential towards the informa- 
tion we are seeking. For instance, the number of myths which 
can in any system be traced to the phenomena of the sun is 
a matter of the highest importance, as showing the influence 
which a certain set of phenomena had upon the national mind : 
but of much less significance is the question of the exact origin 
of the different features in these legendary tales. If any given 
tale be found to originate solely in a confusion of language, a 
mistaken, misinterpreted epithet, then it has almost no interest 
for us as an interpreter of the popular thought and feeling : 
unless indeed the shape which the story takes should reproduce 
(as it probably will) some one of the universal forms which 

2 A 



354 APPENDIX. 



seem to stand ready in the human mind for the moulding of its 
legends. 

With regard to the particular question of sun (and other 
nature) myths and their occurrence, the question which stands 
between rival disputants is something of this sort : ' All myths, 
that is, all primitive legends,' says one party which may be 
regarded as the philological school, ' are found, if we examine 
closely enough into the meaning of the proper names which 
occur in them, to represent originally some natural phenomenon, 
which is in nine cases out of ten (at least for southern nations) a 
story of some part of the sun's daily course, some one of his 
innumerable aspects.' ' Is it conceivable,' say their opponents 
(we may call these the anthropologists) ' that man could ever 
have been in such a condition that all his attention was turned 
upon the workings of nature or upon the heavenly bodies ? Far 
more probable is it, that these stories arose from a variety of 
natural causes, real traditions of some hero, reminiscences of 
historical events transformed in the mist of exaggeration, or the 
legacy of days when men had strange and almost inconceivable 
ideas about the world they live in, when they thought animals 
spoke and had histories like men, that men could and frequently 
did become trees, and trees men, etc., etc. Indeed, so strange 
and senseless are the notions of primitive men, that it is wasted 
labour to try and interpret them.' This is a rough statement of 
the two heads of argument. The second, so far as merely 
negative, must fall before positive proof, as that the nature-myth 
hidden in an immense number of stories can be by philology 
satisfactorily unravelled. There is, however, also positive proof 
on the other side, when many stories, which as nature-myths 
interpreted on philological principles should only have existed 
among the people of a particular linguistic family, are found 
among other races who have no real relation whatever to the 
first. 

Both these sets of facts can be adduced, and to reconcile 
them in every case would no doubt be hard. On the whole, 
however, it will perhaps be found that, as has just been said, 
certain moulds for the construction of stories seem to exist 
already in the human mind, obeying some natural craving, 
and into these, as into a Procrustean bed, the myth more or 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES, 355 

less easily must fit. These primitive forms do not, however, 
preclude the undoubted existence — strange as such a pheno- 
menon may appear — of an especial mythopaeic age connected 
with man's observations of the phenomena of nature — an age 
in which natural religions gained their foundation, and when the 
doings of the external world had a much deeper effect upon 
man's imagination than in later times they have ever had. 

P. 266. Trior's journey to the house of giant Utgardloki (out- 
world fire — fire of the under-world of Chapter X., and Chapter 
XL, p. 278) — is not told in the elder Edda, but appears at some 
length in the Edda of Snorro (Daemisogur 44—48). There can 
be little question of the antiquity of the tale, closely connected 
as it is with the labours of Hercules as well as with all the most 
important elements in the Norse mythology. But it may very 
easily be that it has undergone some modifications before ap- 
pearing in its present form ; and we should be naturally inclined 
to signalise as modern additions those parts of the story which 
have an allegorical rather than a truly mythical character. 
Allegory is a thing altogether distinct from real myth, and when 
it springs up shows that the mythical character of the story is 
falling into oblivion. The former is a growth of self-conscious 
fancy, while the latter is the child of genuine belief. For 
instance— as an illustration of the difference between allegory 
and mythology — I should be inclined to signalise the appearance 
of the beings Logi (fire) and Elli (old age) as a fanciful, an 
invented element in the story. Logi and Elli are not important 
enough to be genuine deities of Fire and Age. In fact, the 
former element has already received its personification in the 
person of Loki. Yet the incidents with which they are associated 
may well have formed an integral character of the older legend; 
and in the case of Elli I feel pretty sure they must have done so. 

What I imagine to have been the real case is this. Thor's 
journey to Utgardloki is a story closely parallel to the myth of 
the Death of Balder, and tells once more the story of the sun-god 
descending to the under-world. This fact is clearly shown by 
the name of the giant, who is nothing else than a personification 
of the funeral fire, the fire which surrounds the abode of souls 
(pp. 275, 278). All the powers with whom Thor strives are per- 



356 APPENDIX. 

sonifications in some way of death — all, or almost all. He tugs 
as he thinks at a cat and cannot lift it from the ground ; 
but the cat is Jormundgandr, the great mid-earth serpent, in 
part the personification of the sea, but also (by reason of this) 
the personification of the devouring hell ' rapax Orcus ' (com- 
pare Cerberus and the Sarameyas, and notice the middle age 
change of Orcus to Ogre). He (or, in the story as we now have 
it, Loki) contends with a personification of the death-fire, not 
with a mere allegorical representation of fire in its common 
aspect. And again he contends not with Elli, old age, but with 
Hel, the goddess of the under- world. 

This is the original form into which I read back the mythical 
journey to Utgardloki. It is easy to see how the story got 
changed. Loki is made to accompany Thor instead of to fight 
against him ; the later mythologists not being able to understand 
how Loki could sometimes be a god and dwell in Asgard, some- 
times be a giant of Jotunheim. With this change the others 
would easily creep in. Logi is invented to fight with Loki, and 
Elli in place of Hel appears in obedience to a desire for allegory 
in the place of true myth. 



CHAPTERS XII. and XIII. 

Edkins, Introduction to Study of the Chinese Characters. 

"LzxLoxm2,T&,Essaisur la Propagation de V Alphabet Phenicien. 

Mahaffy, Prolegomena to History. 

Rawlinson, Five Monarchies. 

Rouge' (Vte de), Origine Egyptienne de P Alphabet Phinicien. 

Taylor, The Alphabet. 

Tylor, Early History of Mankind. 

None of the Semitic alphabets can be considered as quite 
complete ; as a complete alphabet requires a subdivision of 
sounds into their smallest divisions, and an appropriate sign for 
each of these. But none of the Semitic alphabets in their 
original forms seem to have possessed these qualifications. 
They never get nearer to the expression of vowel sounds than. 



NOTES AND AUTHORITIES. 357 

by letters which may be considered half vowels. Each of their 
consonants (in Phenician, Hebrew, Arabic) carried a vowel 
sound with it, and was therefore a syllabic sign and not a true 
letter. 

No account is here given of the theory that the Chinese and 
the Babylonian writing are derived from the same source, as 
this new and startling theory is not sufficiently upon the tapis 
to be treated of in a book of this kind. The reader who is 
desirous of informing himself upon the subject may do so (as 
far as is yet possible) by obtaining the pamphlet by M. Terrien 
de la Couperie, Early History of Chinese Civilization, wherein 
this theory was first expounded, as also another and subsequent 
brochure , History of Archaic Chinese Writing. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

Curtius, History of Greece (trs.). 
Gibbon, with notes by Milman, etc 
Latham, Germania of Tacitus. 
Latham, Nationalities of Europe. 
Von Maurer, Op, cit. 
Mommsen, Die unterital. Dialekten. 
Mommsen, Roman History (trs.). 

P. 320. Following Mommsen, the Etruscans are here spoken 
of as though belonging to the Italic family. This is liable to 
grave doubts ; but the question is at present too unsettled to 
admit of satisfactory discussion in this place. 



THE END, 



INDEX. 



"Abant" the word, 154. 
Abraham, Bible history begins 
with, 113, 129; and Lot, 126, 

155. 
Accad, 125. 

Accadians, 124, 128 ; the inven- 
tors of cuneiform writing, 311. 
Adoption, ceremony of, among 

the Aryans, 146. 
Agglutinative languages, 79, 81, 

83, 88 et seq. j spoken by the 

yellow race, 118. 
Agni, 210; hymn to, 211 ; the 

Indian fire-god, 248. 
Agricultural life, the, gives rise to 

new relations, 156. 
Ahana, 257. 
Ahura-mazda, the god of Zoroas- 

trianism, 234. 
Air-god of the Egyptians, 188. 
Alani, the, 104, 325. 
Alaric, 325. 
Alphabet, the Phoenician, 304 et 

seq. 
Amenti, 179. 
Amun, 181, 201. 
Ana, 193. 
Ancestor worship, 143 ; of the 

Aryans, 147. 
Angles, the, 325. 
Animal gods of the Egyptians, 

191. 
Animal worship of the Egyptians, 

123. 
Anubis, 192. 
Aphrodite, 206, 224 ; an Asiatic 

divinity, 318. 



Apollo, 202, 209, 214 ; the god of 
the Dorians and Ionians, 216 ; 
shrines of, 216 ; the sun - god 
pursuing Daphne. 257 ; found 
in the mythology of all branches 
of the Aryan family, 258. 

Aral, lake, the region of, the 
home of the Turanians, 120. 

Aramaeans, 124. 

Aratrum, the word, 108. 

Ares, the national divinity of the 
Thracians, 220. 

Armenians, 99. 

Art, the earliest rudiments of, 

17. 

Artemis, 204, 223 et seq.; and 
Endymion, the story of, a moon 
myth, 263. 

" Arthur's Chase," 226. 

Aryans, 98; the origin of, 99 ; evi- 
dence of language concerning, 
108 ; the early, a pastoral peo- 
ple, 132 ; their entry into Eu- 
rope, 133 ; their social system, 
140 ; their faculty for abstract 
thought, 201 ; the other world 
of, 241 et seq. ; possessed a spi- 
ritual conception of the soul, 
246 ; separation of, 316 ; their 
languages, 90 ; two main divi- 
sions of, 91 ; their mythology, 
remarkable for diversity of its 
legends, 199 ; their religion 
contrasted with Semitic, 197 ; 
the sky-god in, 199. 

Ashara, the, 195. 

Ashtoreth, 194. 



3 6 ° 



INDEX. 



Assyrians, the, 98, 129 ; their 

gods, 193 et seq. 
Athene, 204 et seq. , 222 . 
Attila, 119. 
Australians, the, 118. 
Avars, the, 119. 
Aztec picture writing, 292. 
Aztecs of Mexico, the, 116. 

Baal, 193. 

Baal Chemosh, 194. 

Baal Zebub, 194. 

Babel, 124. 

Babylon, 127. 

Babylonians, the, 98. 

Bseda, quotation from, 1. 

Balder, 203 ; a sun-god, 229, 246; 
the myth of his death, 250 et 
seq. 

Barbarians, origin of word, 105. 

Barbarossa, legend of, 278. 

Barter in the stone age, 139. 

Bavarians, the, 104. 

" Beauty and the Beast," 259. 

Bel Merodoch, 194. 

Beowulf, 327 ; the poem of, 267; 
the Lohengrin myth in, 276. 

Bible narrative, an aid to prehis- 
toric study, 2 ; itself corrected 
and enlarged by prehistoric in- 
quiry, 5 ; continuous history be- 
gins with Abraham, 113. 

Bil, Assyrian sun-god, 193. 

Black races, the, 115. 

Bow, earliest use of the, 50. 

Brahma, 202. 

Brehon laws, the, 322. 

Brennus, 322. 

Bridge of death, the, 277. 

Bronze age, the, 54 ; domestica- 
tion of animals in, 148. 

Bronze introduced into Europe 
by the Aryans, 140. 

Bronze weapons, found through- 
out Europe, 149. 

Browning's " Pied Piper of 
Hameln," 272. 

Bulgarians, the, 106. 



Burgundians, the, 104, 325. 

Burial customs, 40. 

Burial mounds. See Tumuli. 

Canaanites, the, 98 ; their gods, 

195- . 

Carinthians, the, 105. 

Case endings, origin of, 75. 

Caspian Sea, the boundary of 
the Aryan home, 243. 

Cattle, place of, in Aryan myth- 
ology, 151. 

Cave-dwellers, 49; implements of, 
15 ; drawings of, 18 ; used fire, 
20 ; skeletons of, 21. 

Celts, the, 101, 322 ; their fight- 
ing capacity, 323. 

Cerberus, 245. 

Chaldsea, 123. 

Chaldseans, 98 ; a mixed people, 
124 ; their buildings, 125; their 
civilization, traces of, found in 
that of Mexico and Peru, 128 ; 
their religion, 193. 

Cherdorlaomer, 126. 

China, 127. 

Chinese, 117 ; kept in a primi- 
tive condition by the early in- 
vention of writing ; their char- 
acters, symbolic, 293 et seq., 
determinitive signs of, 295 ; 
their civilization connected with 
that of the Accadians, 128. 

Cimbri, the, 103. 

Civilization, successive steps in 
the earliest, 135. 

Clovis, 325. 

Commerce of Cave-dwellers, 52 ; 
among the Aryans, 152. 

Confucius, 127. 

Cord records, 284. 

Crab, the word, 68. 

Cromlechs, 42. 

Cuneiform writing, 310. 

Cupid and Psyche, the myth of, 
258. 

Cushites, the, 119. 

Cybele, 205. 



INDEX. 



361 



Czechs, the, 105. 

Dagon, 194. 

Daphne, the dawn, 257. 

Daughter, signification of the 
word, 108, no, 132, 200. 

Dawn and evening in the Veda, 
212. 

Death, the region of, 236 et seq.; 
Aryan idea of, 237 ; Egyptian 
idea of, 238 ; a journey to the 
sky, 241 ; the Indian concep- 
tion of, 244 ; the river of, 243 ; 
and sleep, 243 ; myths of, 273 ; 
the various images of, in popu- 
lar tales, 278. 

Delphi, 216. 

Demeter, 204, 205 ; and Perseph- 
one, 220 et seq. 

Determinitive signs, 295. 

die the Latin root, 70. 

Domestication of animals in sec- 
ond stone age, 50; in the bronze 
age, 148. 

Drift implements, 10 ; form a 
class apart, n ; types of, 13. 

Drift period, men of the, 49. 

Druid circles, so-called, 42. 

Dutch, 99, 104. 

Dyaus, 199, 202, 207. 

Eadwine, King, 1. 

Earth-goddess of the Aryans, 
204. 

Eddie poems, 327. 

Egypt, history begins in, 52, 121; 
peculiar features of nature in, 
178 ; the land-root of civiliza- 
tion, 314. 

Egyptians, 97. 

Egyptian civilization, the contin- 
uation of that of the stone age, 
121 ; intellectual character of, 
122. 

idea of death and the 

soul, 238 et seq. 

life and thought, two ele- 



ments in the character of, 122. 



religion, 176 ; how dis- 
tinguished from that of other 
nations, 178 ; influence of na- 
ture on, 178 ; nature gods of, 
181 ; distinctive feature of, 181 ; 
divinities of, 1S1 et seq. 

writing, 298 et seq.; mixed 



character of, 301 ; difficulty in 
deciphering, 302 ; Hieratic and 
Demotic, 303. 

El. See II. 

Elamites, 125. 

Elysian Fields, 242. 

English, the, 104. 

Erde and Herde, 94. 

Erech, 125. 

Eskimo, the, 117. 

Etruscans, the, 320. 

Fee, the word, 151. 

" Fight of Finnsburg," 327. 

Finnish tongues, 90. 

Finns, the, 117. 

Flemings, the, 104. 

Flint weapons of Presigny, 139. 

Franks, 104, 325. 

French, the, 99. 

Frey, 203, 204. 

Freyja, 204 ; the goddess of 

spring, beauty, and love, 230. 
Freyr, 230. 
Frigg, 204, 205, 230. 

Gaedhill, 101. 

Gaels, 101. 

Gaulish myth of a sea of death, 

276. 
Gauls, the, 101. 
Genghis Khan, 119. 
Geological periods, length of, 7. 
Gerda, 231. 
German and English, kinship of, 

92. 
Germans, the, 99. 
Gesture language gives no insight 

into the origin of language, 62. 
Gewiss, the word, 66. 
Gipsies, 159. 



362 



INDEX. 



Glass mountains, the stories of, 
allegories of death, 279. 

Goths, the, 324. 

Government, an extensive scheme 
of, impossible to a people ig- 
norant of social arts, 167. 

Graeco-Italic family, the, 319. 

Grammatical terminations ac- 
counted for, 74. 

Greek conception of the realms 
of death, 241 et seq. 

Greeks, 99, 102 ; appearance of in 
Europe, 133; their religion, 214; 
the first European nation, 317 ; 
from the beginning a commercial 
people, 318. 

Grimm's laws, 107. 

Hackelberg, the wild huntsman 
of the Harz, 270. 

Hades, 241. 

Hadubrand and Hildebrand, the 
lay of, 327. 

Hamites, the, 119. 

Hapi, 192. 

Hathor, 188. 

Hel, 250. 

Hellenes, 102 ; first use of the 
word as a national epithet, 319. 

Hera, 204. 

Heracles, 202, 209 ; life and la- 
bors of, 218. 

Hermes, 217 et seq.; the wind 
god, 232, 244. 

Heme the Hunter, 226, 249. 

Hieratic and Demotic writing of 
the Egyptians, 303. 

Hieroglyphic writing of the Egyp- 
tians, 298. 

Hindoos, 98. 

History, prerequisite conditions 
of, 3. 

Hittites, the, 315. 

Hoa, 193. 

Hormuzd, 234. 

Horus, 184, 196, 201. 

House-fire, the sacred, among the 
Aryans, 144. 



Householders, assembly of, in the 

village community, 163. 
Human victims found in tumuli, 

37- 
Huns, the, 119. 
Hunter, life of the primitive, 

137. 

Iberians, the, 101. 
Ideographs, groups of, 294. 
II, the most ancient conception 
of God known to the Semites, 

195. 
Implements of later stone age, 

39- 
Incas of Peru, 116. 
Indians, the North American, 

159 ; "picturing" of, 288, 290 

et seq. 
Indra, 202, 206 ; hymn to, 208 ; 

character of, 209 ; resembles 

Apollo, 217. 
Inflected language, 79, 81, 83 ; 

spoken by the white race, 118 ; 

divisions of, 118. 
Inflections, growth of, 70 ; the 

third stage in the formation of 

language, 72. 
Ishtar, 194. 
Isis, 189, 195, 196. 
Israel, the children of a nomadic 

people, 130. 
Italians, 99 ; the primitive, 

320. 

''Jack the Giant Killer," 264. 

Japanese use of Chinese charac- 
ters, 296. 

"Javan " in the Bible for Ionians, 
318. 

Jupiter, 199, 202, 206, 207. 

Kaiser Karl in the Unterberg, 

278. 
Karkemish, 315. 
Kinship in languages, 91. 
Kitchen-Middens. See Shell 

Mounds. 



INDEX. 



363 



Kneph, 188. 

Kurdur - Nankunty, a king of 
Susa, 126. 

Lake dwellings, bronze weapons 
found in the later, 150. 

Lake villages, the, 44 ; construc- 
tion of, 45 ; object of 46 ; civi- 
lization of, 47, 52. 

Language, the growth of, 55 ; 
five stages in, 81 ; arrested by 
the invention of writing, 84 ; 
change in, resolved into two 
forces, 85 ; classification by, 
106 ; holds the records of past 
times, 106 ; the key to the early 
Aryan civilization, 141. 

Langue d'oil and langue d'oc, 66. 

Lapps, the, 117. 

Letters, invention and growth of, 
280 et seq.; invention of, by 
the Egyptians, 301. 

Law first connected with religion, 
166. 

Leiche, the word, 93. 

Lithuanians, the, 99, 105. 

Lohengrin, myth, 275, 276. 

Loki, 210. 

Lombards, the, 104. 

Longobardi, the, 325. 

Lot, 126. 

Ma, the Sanskrit root, 68. 
Magyars, the, 119. 
Mammoth age, the, 10. 
Mammoth, drawing of a, by a 

prehistoric man, 18. 
Man, the earliest traces of, 6 ; 

his first stages of life, 16. 
" Man," the one who measures, 

68. 
Mankind, progress of, in the 

stone ages, 48 et seq. 
Maoris, the, 118. 
Mara, the name, 272. 
Mark, the word, 153. 
Marriage ceremony among the 

Aryans, 145. 



Maruts, the hymn to, 209. 

Maut, an Egyptian divinity, 187. 

Melanesia, 115. 

Menes, 121. 

Mesopotamia, 123. 

Milky Way, the, a river of death, 
277. 

Minos, 318. 

Mir, the Russian, 162. 

Mitra, 211. 

Mnemonics, different systems of, 
284 et seq. 

Moloch, 194. 

Monger, the word, 153. 

Mongolians, marks of the, 120. 

Monosyllabic language, 78, 81, 83. 

Montenegrins, the, 106. 

Moon, "the measurer," 68. 

Moon -gods of the Egyptians, 185. 

Moon myths, 262 et seq. 

Moravians, the, 105. 

Moses receives the law, 166. 

Mound-builders, their religion, 40. 

Mythologies, the relationship be- 
tween different, 173 ; of the 
different Aryan nations, 176. 

Mythology explained through the 
study of language, 172, 173 ', 
the earliest, 177 ; of the She- 
mites barren in incident and 
character, 195 ; the stories re- 
lated of the gods, 255. 

Myths, diversity of, 254 ; of death 
and the other world, 273. 

Nation, the beginnings of, 313, 

316. 
Nations of the prehistoric world, 

133- 

Nature worship at the bottom of 
most mythologies, 173 ; this 
does not imply an absence of 
spirituality, 176 ; the objects of, 
everywhere the same, 177 ; in 
Aryan religions, 197. 

Neanderthal, 15 ; skeleton dis- 
covered in, 22. 

Nebo, 194. 



3 6 4 



INDEX. 



Negroes of Africa and Melane- 
sia, 115. 

Neit, 187. 

Neolithic era, 13, 29. 

Nephthys, 190. 

Nergal, 194. 

Nerthus, 204. 

New Guinea, 115. 

Nibelungen, the, 327. 

Nile, the, significance of to the 
Eyptians, 180 ; the personifica- 
tion of, 192. 

Nimrod, 125. 

Nin, 194. 

Noah, 118. 

Norsemen, the other world of the, 
249. 

Obotriti, the, 105. 

O'Brien, origin of the name, 

323. 

Odin, 204, 224 et seq.; the heav- 
en god, 227 ; collects the souls 
of heroes slain in battle, 249, 
268 ; as the Wandering jew, 
etc., 264 , as the " Pied Piper" 
of Hameln, 264, 272 ; as the 
arch fiend, 270. 

" Old Mother Goose," 272. 

Osiri, the name, how written by 
the Egyptians, 301. 

Osiris, 182, 193, 196, 201. 

Ostro-Goths, the, 104. 

Ouse, the, prolific in drift imple- 
ments, 11. 

Oxus, the, 99. 

Palaeolithic era, 13, 25. 

Pan, 215. 

Pastoral life, qualities involved 

in, 150 ; a nomadic one, 151. 
Patriarch, the authority of a, part 

of Aryan religion, 167. 
Patriarchal family, the, 141. 
Patriarchal customs, 142. 
Patroclus, funeral of, a picture of 

Aryan rites, 247. 
Pecunia, the word, 151. 



Pelasgi, 102, 320 ; the worship- 
pers of pure nature, 215. 

Persephone, 204, 221 et seq. 

Perseus and the Gorgon, a sun 
story, 262. 

Persians, 98. 

Perthes, M. Boucher de, 11. 

Peruvian system of mnemonics, 
284. 

Phantom army, the legend of, 
225, 249. 

Phoebus Apollo, the god of the 
younger Greeks, 318. 

Phoenicians, 98, 129 ; commercial 
needs gave rise to their alpha- 
bet, 305 ; the transporters of 
civilization, 315 ; in Europe, 
317. 

Phoenician alphabet, 304 ; how 
formed, 305 ; resemblance to 
Hieratic writing of Egyptians, 
306 ; the parent of all existing 
alphabets except Japanese, 308; 
how modified, 309. 

Phonetic signs, origin of, 299 et 
seq. 

Phonetic writing, transition to, 
297. 

Picture records, 287. 

Picture writing, 289 et seq. 

Picturing, 287 ; distinguished 
from picture-writing, 290. 

"Pied Piper of Hameln," the, 
264, 272 ; a Slavonic legend, 

273- 

Poles, the, 99, 105. 

Polynesian islands, 1 1 8. 

Pomeranians, the, 105. 

Pottery, broken, strewed at the 
grave's mouth, 40. 

Prehistoric conditions, our knowl- 
edge of, uncertain, 4. 

Prehistoric studies, aids to, 2; of 
events, rather than chronologi- 
cal, 6. 

Prince Hatt under the earth, the 
Swedish story of, 260. 

Prithvi, 205, 220. 



INDEX. 



365 



Proper names, researches into, 
111; in the Bible often stand 
for races, 114. 

Prussians, the, 105, 

Ptah, 184. 

Pyramids, a sort of tumuli, 53. 

Python, the, 202. 

Quipus, the Peruvian cord rec- 
ords, 285. 

Ra, 184. 

Red races, 116 ; considered by 

some a variety of the yellow 

race, 118. 
Religion of the mound-builders, 

40 ; first signs of, 51. 
Religious rites hard to trace back, 

172. 
Rents, the three, 152. 
Rex, the, 95, log. 
Rivers, English, the names of, 

Keltic, in. 
Romans, the, 99, 102, 320 ; de- 
velopment as a nation, internal, 

321. 
Rome, her proficiency in the arts 

of government, 168. 
Root sounds, 67. 
Runes, Gothic, 309. 
Russians, the, 99, 105. 
Russian village communities, 169. 

Sabha, the, 144. 

St. Ursula, the myth of, 263. 

San, 194. 

Sarama, 218 ; the Sons of, 244. 

Sargon I., 125. 

Sarrasin, the word, 159. 

Sati, 188. 

Savitar, hymn to, 213. 

Saxons, 325. 

Scandinavians, 99, 104. 

Sea coast, gradual protrusion of, 

34. 
Sea of death, the, mythical, 276. 
Sekhet-Pasht, 185. 
Semitic languages. See Aryan. 



Semitic races, 97. 

Semitic religion infused with awe, 
198. 

Servians, the, 106. 

Shell mounds, 29, 34 ; proofs of 
their antiquity, 35, 136. 

Sheol, 241, note. 

Siamese, the, 117. 

Sigurd the Volsung, 267 ; fire and 
thorn hedge used in the tale of, 
278. 

Silesians, 105. 

Sin, 194. 

Skirnir, 231. 

Sky-divinities of the Egyptians, 
187. 

Sky-god of the Aryans, 200. 

Slavonians, the, 103, 104; pushing 
back the Tartars, 119. 

Social life, early, 135. 

Soil-deity of the Egyptians, 189. 

Somme, the, drift implements 
first discovered in the bed of, 
11. 

" Son of," how used in the Bible, 
114. 

Sorabians, the, 105. 

Sothis, 192. 

Sound and sense, connection of ,61. 

Spanish, the, 99. 

Speech, the origin of, indiscover- 
able, 59. 

Stone age, the two periods of, 12. 

Stone age, the old, man's life in, 
24 ; animals of, 26. 

Stone age, the later, 28 ; theories 
to account for the transition to, 
28 ; continuous history begins 
with, 29 ; man of, in Denmark, 
3c ; navigation of, 30 ; domes- 
tic animals in, 32, 36 ; men 
of, not cannibals, 32 ; burial 
mounds of, 36 ; human vic- 
tims in, 37 ; classes of imple- 
ments of, 38 ; pottery of, 39 ; 
ornaments, 41 ; burial customs 
of, 40 ; tumuli, the truest ex- 
isting representatives of, 43 ; 



3 66 



INDEX. 



also called the polished stone 
age, 43 ; duration of. in Europe, 
44 ; civilization of, 47 et seq.; 
successive steps in, 49 et seq.; 
first signs of religion in, 51 ; 
civilization of, 52 ; implements 
of, different materials of, 50 ; 
people, little known of their 
social state, 136. 

Stone ages, progress of mankind 
in, 48 et seq. 

Stonehenge, 36, 42. 

Suevi, the, 104, 325. 

Sun, supreme god of the Semitic 
nations, 200 ; hopes of futurity 
suggested by, 246. 

Sun -god. the death of, 236. 

Sun-gods of the Egyptians, 181 
et seq.; how regarded by the 
Indo-European nations, 202. 

Sun-heroes, the different, 262. 

Sun-myths, 257. 

Surya, 211. 

Susa, 126. 

Swan, the, connected with ideas 
of death, 275. 

Swarga, 244. 

Symbolical teaching of the Egyp- 
tians, 191. 

Tallies, the invention of,the germ 
of writing, 283. 

Tannhauser, the legend of, 263. 

Tartar class of languages, 89. 

Tartar races, invasion of the, 119. 

Tasmania, 114. 

Tellus, 205. 

Teutonic family of nations, 103, 
104. 

Teutons, village history of the, 
169 ; divisions of, 324 ; an agri- 
cultural people, 326 ; conquer- 
ors, 326 ; feudal, 327 ; poems 
of, 327. 

Tew, 199. 

Thanatos, 241. 

Thammuz, 194. 

Thibetans, the, 117. 



Thmei, 192. 

Thor, 202 ; labors of, 228 ; as 
•' Jack the Giant Killer," 264 ; 
the recovery of his hammer, 264. 

Thoth, 185, 194. 

" Time and Tide," 94. 

Timur Link (Tamerlaine), 119. 

Tomb- builders, the, 36. 

Towns, English, the names of 
Teutonic, etc., in. 

Tumuli, 36 ; contents of, 37 ; 
pottery found in, 52, 125 ; civi- 
lization of the builders of the, 
138. 

Turanian languages, 88. 

Turanians of Central Asia, 119 ; 
the early inhabitants of India 
were, 120. 

Turks, the, 1 19. 

Typhon, 196, 202. 

Tyr, 228. 

Ulfilas, 324. 

Ur of the Chaldees, 125. 

Urki, 194. 

Urvasi and Pururaras, the story 

of, 258. 
Ushas, 205. 

Vandals, 104, 325. 

Van der Decken, 226. 

Valkyriur, the, 249, 269 ; changed 
into witches, 272, 275. 

Varuna, 203 ; corresponds to 
Ouranos, 231. 

Vedic religion of India, 207. 

Verb endings, origin of, 75. 

Village community, the, 159; fea- 
tures and regulations of, 160 ; 
relation of the members to each 
other, 161 ; correspondence of 
the Russian Mir to, 162 ; source 
of authority in, 162 ; essentials 
of a true, 163 ; assembly of 
householders, 163 ; origin of, 
163 ; the ideas of personal and 
communal property arise in, 
165 ; origin of, distinction be- 



INDEX. 



367 



tween divine and human law, 
in, 167 ; changes resulting from 
the adoption of, 68 ; chief of 
the Teuton, possessed of but 
little power, 170. 

Visi- Goths, 104. 

Vortices of national life, 313. 

Vritra, 209. 

Vul, 194. 

Wampum, 284. 

" Wandering jew," the, 264, 270. 

White races, 118. 

Wiltzi, 105. 

Wind-myths, 268. 

Words, significant and zw-signifi- 

cant, 57 et seq. ; formation of, 

by joining others, 72. 
Writing, the art of picturing 



sound, 281 ; the invention of, 
282. 

Yaranas, 100, 132. 
Yellow races, 117. 
Yes, origin of the word, 65. 

Zend Avesta, 207, 233, 235. 

Zend language, the, 235. 

Zend religion, the, pre-eminence 
of, 232. 

Zeus, 199, 202, 206 ; the Olym- 
pic and Pelasgic, 214 ; shrines 
of, at Dodona and in Elis, 215, 
227. 

Zio, 199. 

Zoroaster, 166. 

Zoroastrianism, 233. 



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